A way to deal with Redundant Failing Torrents

[fatfingers]

Scenario:

Torrent X contains 13 files.

Torrent Y contains 11 files.

Torrent Z contains only 1 file.

You, as a human being, can deduce that Torrent Y contains the 11 files already contained in Torrent X. Torrent Z contains one file already in both X and Y. Why have all of them? We all have our reasons for doing this. Perhaps the files are a few years old and seeders are sparse causing speed and reliability issues. So you take three torrents and watch them race eachother. It nags at you because you're just wasting bandwidth knowing that if only you could merge pieces downloaded from two separate torrents, you'd be done and seeding all three torrents yourself.

Solution:

You click uTorrent's brand new "Merge Duplicate Files" button, and voila. uTorrent scans your list of torrents, checks CRCs, Hashes, byte size, and piece counts. It pops up a dialog:

"arf-gvx.301.BLaBBo.xYz.avi" and "The Generic Video X Show - S03E01.avi" seem to be the same. Merge these two files?

This works because you are the missing link. The human element that knows whether or not these files are actually supposed to be the same. Just like entering a sequence of characters in a scrambled image to verify a new email account, there are things you can provide that a computer just doesn't know. In this case, uTorrent matched up the file size, verified the piece count, etc, and you verified that "gvx" is the same as "Generic Video X". It's the same file. You know it, and now uTorrent does.

And best of all, now you've got three torrents all working toward the same goal with no wasted time or bandwidth. And when it's done downloading, you now have three revitalized (yet still redundant) torrents you can seed. But with the volume of uTorrent users out there, it could really make redundancy moot. Once you get a swarm of people out there leeching and seeding, eventually it won't matter which torrent you download because they'll all have the same swarm.

Three cheers for uTorrent!

Extra precautions can be taken to prevent mishaps involving RAR files, all of which may have the same file size to begin with. But it should still work even if one guy in the chain happened to rename the rar files for organizational purposes and re-upload a new torrent.

Anyway. That's my request. I got tired of staring at 8GB of downloaded data and still not having the 4GB of files I needed.

[Firon]

BT doesn't really have any concept of what files are. It works based on blocks of data, which can and do span files. A request like this isn't really feasible.

[Switeck]

Often, a large torrent will use a piece size of 1 MB or larger...while a small single-file torrent might have a piece size of 256 KB or smaller. So there's not even hash matching as a means of determining that pieces from the separate torrents are the same!

[jewelisheaven]

You have multiple torrents for the same files too eh? Unless this happens for hundreds of files it's not that bad, espeically in 1.8ß with the manual repathing under Files. You want to seed multiple swarms with DIFFERENT infohashes, you need multiple torrents, period. Without the same info hash it is not the same torrent. Of note: why the topic title "redundant failing" you didn't mention anything being wrong with the torrents themselves??

In any case how to do what i described above... Depending on which torrent you have already (it helps to have the largest already done) for multiple file torrents (read as: folders) on the 2nd and any subsequesnt torrent, stop it, right click, advanced, change download location, browse to folder. Make sure you click the folder. Then right click / Start . It will proceed with checking, and give you a thumbs up for all completed files. (NB: with multiple files of which you do not have them all you will get incomplete (not 100% finished) files under the Files tab. This is normal as the piece is not complete.