Downloads from movie-rental/purchase site stop cold

[porlock]

I've never seen anything quite like this before.

I rented a couple of movies and purchased one more from ameibo.com, in Sweden. They use BitTorrent to deliver their product. My first item came in fine, but the three following reached some point and stopped dead in their tracks.

Here's what I can tell you about transfers that have halted:

1) Their downloads are the only ones affected. I can run any number of other torrents at the same time without a problem, though I am avoiding that so as to get their movies faster.

2) Their seed source, seed.ameibo.com, is indeed trying to get hold of uTorrent here, and failing. There is some exchange of activity (I can give details later if it will help), then their machine sends a volley of RST packets.

(Apparently my choice of movies isn't very popular, because so far I have never seen another seed or peer.)

3) There can be both stalled and working transfers running at the same time. Note that all of these come from the same seeding source, seed.amebio.com.

4) As you might expect, working downloads show one in the swarm and one connected; the failed ones show one in the swarm and zero connected.

5) If I delete (or rename) the partial download file, force re-check and then restart the torrent, it does start working properly. That is the only thing that works. (It also screws up the DRM on the rentals, so it's not something I want to use as a workaround).

6) Their torrents are set up to update their tracker once every minute, and that seems to be working properly.

For various reasons, while all this was going on, this computer was restarted several times, so uTorrent was started several times. Transfers that had halted did not start back up again.

The patch to increase the number of connections has been applied (I repeated it just today, in fact, to make sure). I also dug up articles on uTorrent setup to try to optimize it, so it can't be too far off the mark.

I could kick myself for this, but I cannot say for certain if the downloads failed only when the machine was restarted. I'm pretty sure that downloads started failing in the middle of running normally, but I can't be absolutely sure of that right now.

I have my own business SDSL, so there are no ISP issues to deal with. As part of the troubleshooting process I put a rule in my gateway/router firewall to accept anything from their home-page server www.ameibo.com, their tracker and their seeder, regardless. I also turned off Windows firewall entirely. Risky, I suppose. Didn't help.

The connectivity test in uTorrent succeeds just fine.

I haven't yet been able to get help on this from the movie house.

I'm not in a position to post uTorrent setup details at this moment, but I can by tomorrow if it would help. Also, I can provide more details from the network traffic captures I did.

Does this ring any bells?

[Firon]

It honestly sounds like a problem with their seed.