The Cellar - View Single Post - Digging into today's peer-to-peer apps

vsp · 07-29-2002, 09:04 AM

And after a frantic weekend of downloading (one MST3K episode, a couple of MST3K shorts and 10 1/2 Freakazoid episodes), my verdict is:

eDonkey is a wonderful tool for hitting a server that "whitelists" files, i.e. only allows specified content to be traded. The Digital Archive Project server is a perfect example of this. This weeds out bandwidth-killing pr0n traders and ensures that if you download a complete file, you're getting the file you expected and the full version of it.

It allows you to download (or upload) chunks of a large file, instead of grabbing the entire thing as one immense unit. You may have 100MB of a 700MB MST3K episode, be downloading the remaining 600MB from four different people at once, and have two other people pulling the first 100MB off of YOUR machine simultaneously. Not too shabby.

eDonkey servers do not communicate with each other. As such, it's somewhat akin to a peer-to-peer FTP -- if you know where to look, you can find all sorts of things. If you are hitting eDonkey servers randomly, you'll find random content, and have a much lower finding-what-you-want/download-successfully hit rate that's comparable to Gnutella searches.

Gnucleus (a Gnutella front-end, which can contact servers for Kazaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, et al) works better than eDonkey if you don't have a specific server in mind; since it searches nearly endlessly, the odds are decent of finding SOMEBODY out there with files you're looking for. Actually obtaining those files is another matter entirely. The phrase "Waiting, more hosts needed" will be burned into your skull after a few sessions, though I strongly suspect that all P2P software will be like this.

Partial files abound. Person A puts up a movie file, let's say, and person B downloads 23% before being cut off. Persons C through R now download the 23% version from B and each other. This makes it very difficult to find full versions and verify that they're full before you waste your time downloading them, unless the files' owners use decent naming conventions.

On the plus side, I now have TMPGEnc, Nero 5.5 and VirtualDub working overtime to whip up Video CDs of most of the shows I'm downloading. My DVD player (a Sony NS-300) isn't supposed to read CDRs, but apparently those with light aqua bottoms are compatible. Fujifilm 80-minute blanks are working great.

I'm still partial to USENET for file distribution (80KB/sec for me compared to 10-15 on a good day over P2P, and .PAR files help repair incomplete sections), but not everyone has a reliable news server or one that carries certain groups, and even good newsfeeds are only as good as the content others choose to post.

07-29-2002, 09:04 AM	#7
vsp Syndrome of a Down Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: West Chester Posts: 1,367	And after a frantic weekend of downloading (one MST3K episode, a couple of MST3K shorts and 10 1/2 Freakazoid episodes), my verdict is: eDonkey is a wonderful tool for hitting a server that "whitelists" files, i.e. only allows specified content to be traded. The Digital Archive Project server is a perfect example of this. This weeds out bandwidth-killing pr0n traders and ensures that if you download a complete file, you're getting the file you expected and the full version of it. It allows you to download (or upload) chunks of a large file, instead of grabbing the entire thing as one immense unit. You may have 100MB of a 700MB MST3K episode, be downloading the remaining 600MB from four different people at once, and have two other people pulling the first 100MB off of YOUR machine simultaneously. Not too shabby. eDonkey servers do not communicate with each other. As such, it's somewhat akin to a peer-to-peer FTP -- if you know where to look, you can find all sorts of things. If you are hitting eDonkey servers randomly, you'll find random content, and have a much lower finding-what-you-want/download-successfully hit rate that's comparable to Gnutella searches. Gnucleus (a Gnutella front-end, which can contact servers for Kazaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, et al) works better than eDonkey if you don't have a specific server in mind; since it searches nearly endlessly, the odds are decent of finding SOMEBODY out there with files you're looking for. Actually obtaining those files is another matter entirely. The phrase "Waiting, more hosts needed" will be burned into your skull after a few sessions, though I strongly suspect that all P2P software will be like this. Partial files abound. Person A puts up a movie file, let's say, and person B downloads 23% before being cut off. Persons C through R now download the 23% version from B and each other. This makes it very difficult to find full versions and verify that they're full before you waste your time downloading them, unless the files' owners use decent naming conventions. On the plus side, I now have TMPGEnc, Nero 5.5 and VirtualDub working overtime to whip up Video CDs of most of the shows I'm downloading. My DVD player (a Sony NS-300) isn't supposed to read CDRs, but apparently those with light aqua bottoms are compatible. Fujifilm 80-minute blanks are working great. I'm still partial to USENET for file distribution (80KB/sec for me compared to 10-15 on a good day over P2P, and .PAR files help repair incomplete sections), but not everyone has a reliable news server or one that carries certain groups, and even good newsfeeds are only as good as the content others choose to post.