Torrents for larger files?

[Roquentin]

I could imagine torrents for very popular files like the Unofficial Oblivion Patch, but not for every random weapon mod.

[DarkeWolf]

I wouldn't worry about it too much Mic. Lon has gotten onto me about that association a few times too ;)

He's fighting the good fight of trying to re-educate people past all the media and social-network BS. Similar to the fight that "hackers" are all bad people. Its not the tools that make it bad, it's what people do with them that's bad.

 

He's brought this up as an option for us to use, in the staff forums a while back. So it's something that could be considered, if we can find a viable implementation that we could consider using.

 

And yes... not ALL torrents are bad. The site that I DL my Windows Boot Disks from seed their files thru torrents, which is perfectly legal. Since boot disks are freely distributable.

[LHammonds]

Doubt it would play off well, because torrents are obviously associated with piracy first and foremost.

 

TL:DR, not saying torrents are illegal, just saying allot of people automatically think "pirate".

 

As DarkeWolf said, I try to educate people about such things. The 1st quote if read by anyone not familiar with the subject might think they should associate torrents with piracy too because who wants to raise their hand and ask questions about something people think is obviously illegal? With nobody rebuking that statement, people may just stand in line behind you with that very incorrect statement as if it were fact.

 

So if you thought torrents were not illegal, your 1st post did not reflect that in the slightest. That's all I'm saying.

 

LHammonds (torrent wannabe)

[NotTarts]

Doubt it would play off well, because torrents are obviously associated with piracy first and foremost.

Torrents would have been used here long ago if there was a fairly easy way of building a torrent seed based off our current database / file system. However, I have not found an easy way to mass-create torrent seeds.

 

If anyone out there has some knowledge on how something like this can be created, please let me know.

 

LHammonds

There is a service called BurnBit with an API that has the ability to automatically create torrent files when given single or multiple web seeds. It looks like it can be integrated very quickly and easily into an existing download system, but you probably don't want to rely on an external service. At the very least, you could contact them to see how it's done.

 

EDIT: Disregard that, it's not what you're looking for. I thought it would link directly to a torrent file but instead it links to an ad-supported external download page.

Edited August 29, 2011 by NotTarts

[LHammonds]

Thanks for checking and trying to come up with a solution. It is appreciated.

 

What we have is a database that includes a description and a seed link to the Nexus download. We need something that we can use such as an API to create torrents.

 

The way I'd imagine it working is either through PHP script or the native OS script that the database server resides on.

[NotTarts]

Thanks for checking and trying to come up with a solution. It is appreciated.

 

What we have is a database that includes a description and a seed link to the Nexus download. We need something that we can use such as an API to create torrents.

 

The way I'd imagine it working is either through PHP script or the native OS script that the database server resides on.

I'm not entirely sure how BurnBit generates the torrent from direct links. There are libraries such as libtorrent that can create torrent files fairly easily, but it's coded in C++ and requires local access to the file (I think this is required anyway, to generate the hashes for the torrent). As inefficient as it seems, it sounds like BurnBit might actually download the file to its server and create the torrent using that. They might be doing something else entirely, though I can't imagine what.

 

EDIT: libtorrent looks the be the best solution at this point. Given a local file, a tracker, and web seeds, it will automatically generate the hashes for the file chunks and create a .torrent file. I can see it working perfectly for future uploads but creating torrent files for the previous database might be a bit tricky.

Edited August 29, 2011 by NotTarts