Hunt for Gollum video

[Fidcal]

Some relatives were over yesterday to look at my new TV and take away my old one and briefly showed me Hunt for Gollum on a popcorn HD. I'd heard good things about this video and those reports are true if the first 5 minutes are anything to go by. If you liked Peter Jackson's LOR movies then you will like this because it catches the style amazingly. It's about 40 minutes long and is a legit freebie. (I understand Tolkien's Trust gave the nod of approval so long as it was free. Even Peter Jackson said, 'hey! did I make that?')

 

So I decided to download but never used a torrent client before. Got uTorrent. Set it up. Then clicked the link. I could make no sense of uTorrent. Seemed to be doing nothing. Finally I realized my web browser Opera was transferring it. D'uh!

 

OK, but while reading up on uTorrent it said bit torrent is more efficient and faster than other download methods. But Opera was saying like 20 hours remaining. The movie is 500MB. My connection is rated at 6mb/s but I think I typically get 2mb/s. But even at 1mb/s I ought to get 500MB in about 8 x 8 - 64 minutes = about an hour. I decided to abort.

 

So my questions are: is that typical or likely just a bad connection? Should I try again later? Try another site? Does that even make any difference?

 

We wants it. My precious!

[OrbWeaver]

BitTorrent is only fast if there are lots of people sharing the file. If only a few people are uploading, you can get very low download speeds.

 

Some torrent sites give you an idea of the "swarm size" (i.e. the number of people uploading and downloading) which roughly correlates with the download speed you can achieve. If you get a low speed, you might want to try again later, try a different torrent, or just leave it running until it's done.

[Fidcal]

Ah! That's like the opposite of downloading from a server where too many downloading slows it down. I'll try what you suggest.

[OrbWeaver]

Ah! That's like the opposite of downloading from a server where too many downloading slows it down.

 

Yes exactly, that's the whole idea. It's an ideal way of distributing large files with a very high peak in popularity, but not so good for sustained availability or less-popular documents.

[Fidcal]

Tried day after day from different downloads but no success with torrent. Finally found it on Rapidshare in mulit rars which took 6 days to download. Audio level rather low but otherwise reasonable quality. Only just started the first few minutes.

 

[jdude]

Yes exactly, that's the whole idea. It's an ideal way of distributing large files with a very high peak in popularity, but not so good for sustained availability or less-popular documents.

 

Yup be prepared to download 2 gigs at 1.2 kb/s :|

[SneaksieDave]

Share a link, Fid?

 

Edit: Actually, wasn't hard to find; first link came up with a handful of choices. I won't link here just in case.

[Fidcal]

Finally watched all 40 minutes. Very impressive for an amateur video and especially when it is emulating a big budget movie. Gandalf, Aragorn, and Gollum all very good and even a decent fight sequence with a dozen orcs or so. Also, the music and choral work I thought was excellent. I was unable to find the credit for those performers.

[STiFU]

You have to check the number of seeders, when downloading torrents. Those are the hosts, that already finished downloading the file und now only upload it. The peers are uploading and downloading that file simultanously, but it's likely that you'll get lower downstream, if only peers are online, and it's also possible that the file might never be finished. If you check on regular TV-Rips (or the most recent releases of TDM), you'll notice like 30.000 Seeders and at that point torrents become faster than nearly any FTP-Server.... (Assuming you're allowing an extensive amount of connections) But of course torrents can also provide reasonable downstream with 20 Seeds or less, depending on their settings.

[Fidcal]

Yeah, that first one I found was the fastest! All the ones I found after that showed like 6 or 7 peers and 0Kbps download.