Best practices for Movie torrents
Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2022 3:56 pm
Hey folks,
I'd like to spark some discussion on how to come up with the best possible approach to torrenting of Movies, which are comparably huge files. For reasons I can't recall, I got thinking about how we differ in preferences and choices with respect to movie storage. Some people don't care at all about any other language than their native one, some prefer to watch originals with subtitles, some are natively speaking languages that rarely if at all make it into a commercial release. Then there's the topic of video resolutions and codecs, which directly affect total file size. Some are perfectly okay with highly compressed low resolution, while others wouldn't even consider it worthwile watching anything which is lower resolution than 1080p, preferably 4K with HDR and 3D sound.
Some people are more restricted on storage capacity than others and try to get file sizes as small as possible, while others wouldn't care if a movie takes up 2 or 100 Gigabytes of storage if their quality needs are fulfilled.
Now, if I browse a typical tracker site for popular movies, I can often find several torrents for the same movie addressing different languages, resolutions, codecs and even file formats. Each of the torrents competes with the others on swarm size and ultimately achievable download speeds, as people rarely add more than one of these torrents to their collection and/or stop seeding most of them after a while to make space for their newest finds.
Yet this approach seems popular with most people due to their relative ease of use: Just add the torrent you like best to your favourite client and wait for the download to finish.
But if one doesn't like the set of choices made by the torrent creators, the only way to do something about it is to create yet another torrent, spreading the potential user base even further.
What if we did things differently when ripping: Instead of creating one single file that contains all the streams we selected (video, audio, potentially subtitles), we could just as well skip the step of multiplexing and create a torrent containing individual files for video, audio and subtitle streams. With more advanced torrent client the user can select which files of a torrent to download and which to skip, or alternatively one could create a set of torrents each containing one individual stream. Of course this would be a trade-off between availability and swarm size on one hand, and user-friendlyness on the other hand, as potential consumers of a movie would still have to perform multiplexing of the movie streams into one file their movie player of choice can understand. But, the user could benefit from potentially better availability, as all people that want a 4K video would share the same video stream, all users which would like to have, say, japanese audio, would share the same audio stream. At the same time, nobody is forced to download parts they're not interested in. Sort of like mix'n'match, where you select and download only those pieces you'd like to have. So if you're after a Dutch 4K version with german subtitles, for which no torrent exists, you don't have to download a 4K movie version with whatever language they have, AND a movie which has Dutch audio, AND one with separate german subtitles not directly burned int the movie stream, AND hope these three match up time-wise.
What Do you guys think?
I'd like to spark some discussion on how to come up with the best possible approach to torrenting of Movies, which are comparably huge files. For reasons I can't recall, I got thinking about how we differ in preferences and choices with respect to movie storage. Some people don't care at all about any other language than their native one, some prefer to watch originals with subtitles, some are natively speaking languages that rarely if at all make it into a commercial release. Then there's the topic of video resolutions and codecs, which directly affect total file size. Some are perfectly okay with highly compressed low resolution, while others wouldn't even consider it worthwile watching anything which is lower resolution than 1080p, preferably 4K with HDR and 3D sound.
Some people are more restricted on storage capacity than others and try to get file sizes as small as possible, while others wouldn't care if a movie takes up 2 or 100 Gigabytes of storage if their quality needs are fulfilled.
Now, if I browse a typical tracker site for popular movies, I can often find several torrents for the same movie addressing different languages, resolutions, codecs and even file formats. Each of the torrents competes with the others on swarm size and ultimately achievable download speeds, as people rarely add more than one of these torrents to their collection and/or stop seeding most of them after a while to make space for their newest finds.
Yet this approach seems popular with most people due to their relative ease of use: Just add the torrent you like best to your favourite client and wait for the download to finish.
But if one doesn't like the set of choices made by the torrent creators, the only way to do something about it is to create yet another torrent, spreading the potential user base even further.
What if we did things differently when ripping: Instead of creating one single file that contains all the streams we selected (video, audio, potentially subtitles), we could just as well skip the step of multiplexing and create a torrent containing individual files for video, audio and subtitle streams. With more advanced torrent client the user can select which files of a torrent to download and which to skip, or alternatively one could create a set of torrents each containing one individual stream. Of course this would be a trade-off between availability and swarm size on one hand, and user-friendlyness on the other hand, as potential consumers of a movie would still have to perform multiplexing of the movie streams into one file their movie player of choice can understand. But, the user could benefit from potentially better availability, as all people that want a 4K video would share the same video stream, all users which would like to have, say, japanese audio, would share the same audio stream. At the same time, nobody is forced to download parts they're not interested in. Sort of like mix'n'match, where you select and download only those pieces you'd like to have. So if you're after a Dutch 4K version with german subtitles, for which no torrent exists, you don't have to download a 4K movie version with whatever language they have, AND a movie which has Dutch audio, AND one with separate german subtitles not directly burned int the movie stream, AND hope these three match up time-wise.
What Do you guys think?