MWS bundle (Magic 2010)

[Clefaria]

Just want to let everyone know that I've changed my 'schedule', in that I'm simply going to make a new bundle with each set, instead of update torrents. The bundle I've got now is about 20 MB if you don't download any card scans, and so one should be able to easily torrent a newly-released bundle 'on top' of an existing one without much needing to be overwritten (as the Pics folder isn't compressed, only new/changed card scans will be re-downloaded when this is done).

I think this will be easier to maintain, and also minimize the 'tracking down' of 'supporting' torrents, and let someone get into MWS with a single up-to-date bundle right away.

Can't wait for Zendikar, by the way, especially once I learned that Harrow is back.

[Clefaria]

I'm debating on whether to release a new bundle with the new masterbase and themes for Zendikar, but without the card scans, until they show up, seeing as how that will take several weeks. It'd be easy enough for a 'torrenter' to simply 'move' to the new torrent including the scans without losing anything by just picking the same folder (this is why I don't 'zip up' the "Pics" folder), so...

Any opinion from anyone here?

[bravado]

Clefaria, I noticed that you mentioned on Mininova that your torrent files are reaching 2 megs. The reason is that you have way too many files being listed in a single torrent. Need to find a way to bring that list down. One way you could streamline the torrents is to zip up each pic folder separately instead of zipping the entire pic folder into one file. That way folks can still pick up on the new pics by just downloading the single zip for a given pic release. The upside of this is that the number of files listed in a torrent would go down significantly. Might be a good idea to zip up other stuff too that go together. Probably good to do so anyways to help bring the total size of the torrent down.

[Clefaria]

Clefaria, I noticed that you mentioned on Mininova that your torrent files are reaching 2 megs. The reason is that you have way too many files being listed in a single torrent. Need to find a way to bring that list down. One way you could streamline the torrents is to zip up each pic folder separately instead of zipping the entire pic folder into one file. That way folks can still pick up on the new pics by just downloading the single zip for a given pic release. The upside of this is that the number of files listed in a torrent would go down significantly. Might be a good idea to zip up other stuff too that go together. Probably good to do so anyways to help bring the total size of the torrent down.

I was already fully aware of why the .torrent files were as large as they are, but thanks anyway. I'll see what happens.

[bravado]

I was already fully aware of why the .torrent files were as large as they are, but thanks anyway. I'll see what happens.

For what it's worth, I found that the current torrent chokes quite a bit due to the large number of files listed. You have over 35,000 files in your torrent and that can have a dramatic effect on torrent performance. I would strongly advise zipping and/or rar'ing the pic folders into appropriate packages (ie. 4E->4E.zip, 4EA->4EA.zip, etc). Doing so will bring the number of files down to just around 128, increasing the performance of the torrent significantly. Plus, you'll be able to list the torrent on Mininova or any other torrent site without avail.

[Clefaria]

I was already fully aware of why the .torrent files were as large as they are, but thanks anyway. I'll see what happens.

For what it's worth, I found that the current torrent chokes quite a bit due to the large number of files listed. You have over 35,000 files in your torrent and that can have a dramatic effect on torrent performance. I would strongly advise zipping and/or rar'ing the pic folders into appropriate packages (ie. 4E->4E.zip, 4EA->4EA.zip, etc). Doing so will bring the number of files down to just around 128, increasing the performance of the torrent significantly. Plus, you'll be able to list the torrent on Mininova or any other torrent site without avail.

Mininova is actually kind of a pain to maintain a description for, since it uses weird formatting for stuff. Also, if some change occurs after X amount of time, I'm out of luck informing its users, because there's a clock on how long after uploading a torrent you can edit its description, for some odd reason. I may just keep .torrent files on my Mediafire, and link to them in my signature here anyway.

The reason I didn't use archives from the start was so that, in the case of moving from one bundle to another (for people in the middle of downloading one when the next is released), they'd be able to move over to it with minimal overwriting if a couple of pictures in an old set have been 'improved' in between. I agree it might not be worth the effort anymore.

And there is also the fact that I kind of want to get used to using OPT more than MWS now, so that will also probably create a change in my bundles at some point. Maybe I'll wait for 1.0 to do that, I don't know.

Anyway, I've been taking all of this into consideration, so we'll see what the next bundle brings.