Pictures for Magic Album

[Goblin Hero]

Pictures in Magic Album are stored in special directory structure incompatible with MWS. You can build this structure yourself, but the most easiest way to get all the pictures - download the torrent. This torrent is a snapshot of MA pictures I use myself. After downloading go to MA preferences and set up the picture folder. Torrent will be regularly updated. You do not have to redownload the whole torrent each time it is updated. Just download new torrent file and run the rehash process. This way only new and changed files will be downloaded.

[FrontLineFodder]

I do like the idea of p2p (torrent) sharing of files. great for sharing bandwidth.

for this however it would work best if the torrent contained the file structure uncompressed as files required by MA.

this way even if you post an updated torrent each client could get away with only downloading the different files / blocks.

As long at the file naming / structure did not change i would be for this.

[Goblin Hero]

it would work best if the torrent contained the file structure uncompressed

Unfortunately it is impossible. Torrent file can't include 20K+ files

[Strainer]

I think the best solution would be to upload them on a set-per-set basis on a filehoster like mediafire or rapidshare.

[goldaar]

I think the set-by-set method is simply autrocious. The first time "catch up" downloading takes forever and the bandwidth is not good with those hosted solutions.

Goblin, why not just rar (or some other container) up your images directory for an initial installation, and then everytime you add another directory toss it up as a seperate, much smaller update? People wont have a problem creating an additional directory every 3 months, but people without extensive SED experience have a TON of trouble renaming the files themselves.

I would personally leave this torrented for a long time, it's so inconvenient to have to rename all the files myself that I still haven't done more than 4 sets (and that's with batch renaming, it's just too inconsistent to do it en mass).

[Goblin Hero]

Ok, I'll create one big torrent with all the pictures just for testing purpose.

[goldaar]

Happy new year!

You are a gentleman and a scholar (or the goblin equiv.), don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

[Goblin Hero]

Look at the site menu. There's a new sumbenu called "Torrents" there. Try it
Torrent integration is in beta now, so pls report whether it works or not.

[Huggybaby]

Here are my observations and comments, take them with a grain of salt.

1. Your tracker isn't working, I get this error:
Failure: Unregistered torrent pass

2. It's a private torrent which is a bad idea. You've disabled DHT, Peer Exchange and Local Peer Discovery which means your torrent will die when your tracker goes down for any reason.

3. You don't need your own tracker, but if you insist consider adding public trackers as well like

Code: Select all

http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce

4. The piece size is large. 1028 x 4 MB. I aim for 5,000-10,000 pieces, so your piece size could be 256 kB.

5. Using one big rar file should be thought about carefully, it really handicaps your users. I'd zip each set individually, and use torrentzip. This gives you more update options and allows users to pick which sets they're interested in so they can get started before having to download the entire thing.

Anyway, it's good to see you moving forward with this!

[Goblin Hero]

Here are my observations and comments, take them with a grain of salt.

1. It concern me most. Should work. Could you try again?
2. I know it's a bad idea and will fix it (3d party plugin)
4. Does it matter?
5. Yea, not the best idea, but multiples of ZIPs is not a good idea too. MA has more complex directory structure.

[Huggybaby]

1.The tracker is working now.

2. It's still a private torrent which is a bad idea.

4. A large piece size doesn't matter if you only have one file.

5. The mame roms torrent has 8,000+ files, this is not a problem, any torrent client can handle it fine.

The HQ Pics torrent would choke without zips, but your torrent doesn't have crops does it? So it might be possible to have a torrent with no zips at all, it would be interesting to see. How many cards are in your set?

<edit> Max download speed is about 90 kB/s, you must be throttling.
<edit> Make it 50 kB/s. Also I guess you have about 17-18,000 pics, I'll test that out.
<edit> An 18,000 pic torrent would work.

[Goblin Hero]

Max download speed is about 90 kB/s, you must be throttling.

No, I have max speed ~125kB/s and limit upload speed to 100.

Also I guess you have about 17-18,000 pics, I'll test that out.

24K pics to be sure. And yes, it works I remember problems creating torrent with lot of files. Ok, I'll recreate torrent with unpacked pictures and try to patch frontend to enable dht.

[Huggybaby]

I'm using 64 bit Windows, 24,000 files will put a strain on some older systems I think!

[Goblin Hero]

I'm using 64 bit Windows, 24,000 files will put a strain on some older systems I think!

Or, yes. Tracker can't handle such like torrent Out of memory error. So it's not a solution.

[Huggybaby]

OK. Did you figure out DHT? I guess you're not using uTorrent, etc.