Hosting the HQ Pictures

[mark]

Hello, I would like to host the HQ pictures. I could serve the files via http, ftp, rsync, git, whatever. The server has 1GBit ethernet up+downlink and a static IP (IPv4 only), so I guess it should be possible.

In my understanding, the Magic Album Pictures torrent is the most complete dataset with HQ cards, so I downloaded it but soon found out that either I am in mass-renaming-and-copying-hell (not once, but every time the torrent gets updated) or forge or it's config has to be changed to be compatible, which maybe is the easier way.
So I would like to plan this together with you.

The file structure in this torrent is (unpacked)
root/{main directories, Back.jpg}
with
main directories/full edition name/language/name.jpg
with
main directories = {Core Sets, Expansions, Promo Cards, Special Sets, Vanguard}.
Examples for full edition name: "1st Limited Edition Alpha", "10th Edition", "Magic 2012", "Ice Age" etc
Examples for languages: ENG, ENG FOIL, ENG TOK, ENG INS, GER, RUS, RUS TOK, ITA, where INS contains cards with imprinted tips&tricks.
The name of the card is the english name, including whitespaces and special characters, e.g. Angel's Feather.jpg. The filename does not end in ".full.jpg"
Lands are named like "Plains [1].jpg"

So, any suggestions?

[Chris H.]

My memory may be faulty but I seem to remember that the code which handles the set info for card pictures is capable of using the folder names used by the HQ card pics by sets located at:

HQ PICS DOWNLOADS and Status List (MTG)

If you can handle scripting chores and can create a (python?) script then you could automate the renaming on your end. If not, you might decide that re-naming the Magic Album Pictures torrent to be too much work.

[mark]

yeah, I wanted to circumvent that because when a new torrent is out, I have to invest computingpower every time which isn't really necessary if the targeted application (forge ) accepted the data directly.

But anyway, I wrote a perl script for the slave labor and it seems to work; "Download LQ Set Pictures" says all pictures have been downloaded
I have to check one thing about token cards, then it is finished and I can release.

For the future I don't have a tarball in my mind, but a completely unpacked filesystem structure for something like a "Download HQ Set Pictures" button, as this will save bandwidth when new cards are added and I don't want users to deal with binary patching. What do you think?

[Chris H.]

Someone in the past provided HQ card pics on a server and a now non-participating programmer added a button to forge which would download these HQ pics. This was done before the card set info was added to forge.

At first everyone was exited ... until people started to notice slow downs and java heap space errors. Some changes were made to the code and launchers were created which increase the java heap space. Even with this work the HQ pics were soon considered to be an unsupported feature. The server went offline last year and the code for the download button was commented out.

It might be best to provide a torrent for a few months to just the users on the forge forum. You could gather some data during this time. You might decide that the bandwidth needed is excessive.

The current new UI project is moving along nicely but it may take a few months or so to finish and to stabilize. Once we reach this point it might become easier for the dev team to assist you in adding a button to forge to download these HQ pics.

[Rob Cashwalker]

The bandwidth use for LQ set pics clocked in at about 40 GB for December.