Choice - Ready-to-Use Torrents or Small-as-Possible Torrent

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

You know how it goes. Many torrents come in a ready-to-use format. Video files are just left as AVIs or MPGs or MKVs. Programs are either left in their individual file form or in an ISO (or other CD/DVD-image format). You DL and use.

Then there are those who come compressed. Generally, they are not a whole lot smaller because of what they are compressing (quite incompressible executables and already-compressed video).

Why does anybody do it that way?

1) It is very inconvenient to the downloader. He has to have twice the space freed up on his hard drive and of course it takes time to decompress.

2) It is not very good to the swarm, because casual users generally don't like duplicates on their hard drive and will delete the RAR archive, leaving the decompressed files that are now useful for him but totally useless for the torrent swarm.

3) It punishes the dedicated seeders by forcing them to have two copies on their disk (RAR and decompressed version) if they actually want to use the DLed file while they are seeding. In similar vein it is not very good for the uploaders, who have to have two copies if they plan on using anything.

So why does anybody do it? Is 10% smaller really that important? Is there anybody here, seeder or DLer, who actually prefer unusable RAR archives.

Actively seeking your opinion, thank you.

[boo]

why people do it is because of other types of P2P like DC++ for example and

those who make torrents with these are either lazy or want to keep it in it's original release form.

[µtorrent-Guest]

as boo already pointed out; in many cases multifile rar archives are just the ORIGINAL format the stuff is released in! so in that case having the original and the extracted one on your HD would be the waste, thats why [specifics removed] are mostly shared in multifile RAR. You just keep the original and if you want to watch you extract one time temp folder.

In the cases where the original content is something that can easily get corrupted and then wothless for seeding (your open source OGG music files for example) just by playing them in your [enter stupid OS here]-Mediaplayer having an archive is also a good choice for sharing.