Hell Is Frozen

Hell is frozen or soon will be. Paramount Pictures is distributing the DVD of a film that will also be distributed via BitTorrent. The Tunnel is a horror film set in the tunnels below Sydney, Australia. I didn't know there were tunnels under Sydney, so I learnt something new today. But apart from that, it is creeping me out that Paramount is involved with anything remotely connected to file sharing. Anyone want to bet the MPAA will sue someone for downloading the film? Right hand, left hand, not knowing, you know what I mean.

Private Torrent Sites

I find private torrent sites very annoying. What's the point?

Usually, the private site will have rules that encourage sharing. But, the number of potential peers is smaller because it's limited to the registered users of the site, which doesn't sound like an advantage to me. The other supposed benefit is that there's less chance that one of the peers is a spy monitoring the torrent swarm. I have doubts about this benefit. I can't imagine a site is going to ask for more than an email address from anybody who registers.

Actually, I think the point of private torrent sites is just elitism, plain and simple. It's like belonging to a private club. It makes people feel special.

BitTorrent Defends Itself

During the recent CRTC net neutrality hearings, BitTorrent was mentioned many times, usually in a less than favourable light, by the ISPs who wish to confuse net neutrality with network management. The thing is, BitTorrent is actually a trademark owned by BitTorrent, Inc, a company started by Bram Cohen, the creator of the protocol. Although some might say that BitTorrent, Inc, is getting too cozy with the content producers, it also demonstrates that the protocol can be used for legitimate distribution.

I suppose BitTorrent, Inc felt the need to defend its name because they filed a late submission to the CRTC, that pokes holes in many of the points raised by the ISPs. Micheal Geist's summary is here. BitTorrent, Inc's client gathers a lot statistics about transfers that allows the company to understand the affect of the protocol on the network. The problem is that the CRTC will likely pay more attention to their cronies from Bell, Rogers, etc., rather than look at real technical facts.

RTorrent 0.8.4

The Debian rtorrent package was upgraded to version 0.8.4 which has a few incompatibilities with the previous package. Since I depend on rtorrent for all my entertainment downloads, I spent some time today making sure there were no problems.

The session file format changed but there is a script, fixSession080-d.py, which will update all the session files to the new version. I only have one session for an extremely large Babylon 5 torrent which I still haven't seeded 1:1 yet so I don't want to lose the current ratio. The script updated the session file without any complaints. You just pass the the session directory (.rtorrent in my case) as an argument:

python fixSession080-d.py .rtorrent

The new version of rtorrent changed the configuration for ratio handling so I also had to update my .rtorrent.rc. My old ratio configuration was:

schedule = ratio,60,60,"stop_on_ratio=100,100M,500"

The stop_on_ratio command no longer exists. The rtorrent wiki page on ratio handling isn't very clear but eventually I came up with this replacement:

ratio.enable=
ratio.min.set=100
ratio.max.set=500
ratio.upload.set=100M

The new rtorrent gives a warning about deprecated configuration commands:

Deprecated on_* commands, use 'system.method.set_key = event.download.{inserted, erased, ...}, , ' instead.

These lines are the culprits:

on_start = lock_torrents,"execute=touch,~/torrents/lock"
on_stop = unlock_torrents,"execute=rm,~/torrents/lock"
on_hash_queued = lock_torrents,"execute=touch,~/torrents/lock"

I haven't figured out the fix for this problem yet, so it is fortunate that it is only a warning for now. Rtorrent's documentation is not the reason I use it. ;-)

Life Without Cable TV

It has been 16 months since I ditched cable TV and yet I watch more "TV" now. Why? Because I can get more shows that I really want to watch with bittorrent, than was possible on cable. Once the non-technical masses can use this easily, cable TV is dead. Bittorrent requires some effort from the user so, by itself, it is not a direct replacement for cable. But more friendly front ends like Miro might just change that.

I have not tried Miro because it depends on xine which seems to use much more resources than mplayer. Anyway, I looked at Miro because it uses RSS feeds to find new episodes of a show. I do this manually now and it is very tedious and error prone. I need something like Miro as a simpler, command line only, application that could automate some of the work. So far, I haven't found anything that might to the job, so it looks like I'll have to write my own.