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Trying to keep a public torrent alive is hard work, but someone has to do it.
Back when I had VDSL and even ADSL, I’d try to hit 1.1 ratio because if everyone did that the risk of information being lost would be close to 0%. Nowadays with gigabit internet, all that prevents me from seeding is hard drive space, and 8 TB doesn’t fill up quickly with how few good movies and series there are these days. I guess that’s one way to stop piracy, just make fewer and worse series/movies.
“Good” is in the eye of the beholder. Have you considered that the quality hasn’t changed much, but instead you’ve become more discerning as you age? I certainly have far less tolerance for the stupid shit I used to think was funny long ago.
I get that. I used to think The Big Bang Theory was funny
*shudder*Same
Yeah, I’m aware of that. And if I liked copoganda I’d be swimming in shows. That’s just getting older I guess.
There’s so much good shit on TV, and at least half of it doesn’t involve cops.
at least half of it doesn’t involve cops.
I like how safe you’re playing that estimate 😂
Like no longer thinking Bio Dome is comedy genius
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
How dare you ! Poly shore is a national treasure !
Good definitely is subjective. I have Robot Jox in my library and it won’t be deleted until I’ve left this mortal coil.
I heard Crash and Burn won’t be deleted either.
Somehow I forgot about that one. I don’t think I ever saw it.
Theoretical sequel, fun to watch if you like 90s post-apocalyptic thriller scifi, although there’s barely any mecha in it.
Never mind then. The bots were the draw in the original. That and, of course, the acting!
The acting’s.not bad for a B movie.
I don’t know who you are, but I love you- spread the good word that “there is no war, only Robot Jox”…
That was fun back in the day when movie studios blamed piracy for their movie performing badly, so someone checked and their movie was barely present or downloaded on the high seas.
Unfortunately BitTorrent clients are kinda messy and don’t make it easy to maintain a long term seeding library. I’ve moved to qbittorrent which is a bit better than Deluge on that regard, but it’s still not great.
Yeah, they are messy. I tried BiglyBT a few years back, and while I love a lot of features, I think that was overkill for sure. qBittorrent is the golden standard at the moment for sure.
Also I don’t understand the upload torrents limit, ok, limit concurrent uploads, but everything I’m seeding should be available all the time
That’s one (of many) reason I’m glad I switched to linux, Back in windows xp days Microsoft tried limiting the amount of “half-open connections” for its users “security”. But even today, some routers just aren’t powerful enough to handle too many connections, and often times the cheap routers that ISP’s provide are limited on purpose either by custom firmware or just by hardware limitations.
How many torrents do you have??? I seed over 7000 torrents concurrently using qbittorrent
I’ve about 2k, but I’ve had to adjust the weird defaults
I used to use Deluge as well but have been really happy with Transmission for years now
Is your issue that it’s hard to move files around without breaking seeding, or something else?
Well, that’s an issue for sure, but in my case it’s just that when you have thousands of torrents seeding it’s hard to keep them organised and navigate them, labels help but not much, essentially my bittorrent client is a bucket of shared files, reviewing what I have, deleting and moving is a hassle.
just had a silly idea: stopping your torrent right as it starts to seed (to avoid ISP letters) is like pulling out as a form of birth control
Yeah, but you still seed while you download
Meta’s legal defense was that they limited seeding to a minimal value as a precaution when they pirated terabytes of books. Of course, I don’t expect the same ruling would be granted to an individual… Shit is fucked.
So they downloaded it all to train their models and didn’t even seed back!?
Yes, beacuse that would be distribution of copyrighted materials…
Digital pre-cum.
How do I delete someone else’s comment?
JFC people, use protection
you mean a VPN ?
yes
Has the law in any jurisdiction determined that sharing some small fraction of bits is equivalent to sharing an entire series of bits? And how do they determine that? Like I’m sending 1s and 0s right now. Is that a violation?
I mean, at that point everything is legal if we pretend to just send “random” 0s and 1s
But there must be some kind of burden of proof, right? If I leech 0.001% of a file, have I really pirated that file? If yes, then how small does the amount go? If no, then how large does it go? Or if they have to prove intent, well then that can go to trial…
The law is whatever the judge says it is. You could have undeniable proof of your innocence and still get convicted.
In the piratebay trial, just announcing the hashes was bad enough for a conviction
I mean, that’s kind of what encrypted traffic looks like to anyone without the private key
Coitus interruptus
One of the few latin expression I memorized, because that’s how the Catholic Church calls it since that’s their recommended “contraception” method, all of which I find hilarious.
That’s… not how it works. A law firm rep (usually) just has to connect to the swarm and see what IPs are there. It matters not if you share, being in the swarm is enough for them to send your ISP a notice of infringement. So as others said, use protection.
I did that.
And rightfully so, I was a 15 year old in a third world country with a beat up compaq computer to download movies overnight. I couldn’t seed cuz my father would find out I wasted the internet.
Today, I can seed and have a 26TB hard drive, I preserve old movies in my native language (Telugu) and seed them.
Do we need people to learn about seeding and ratios? Definitely. But I believe in
Today’s leechers are tomorrow’s seeders.
And don’t blame them.
Sounds like you grew up and your hardware did too!
Not everyone is able to seed unfortunately. Here the downloading aspect although not allowed seeding is when you can receive fines.
Hence I cross seed everything to I2P.
Of course only Linux ISOs 😉
I leech because i have a 1mbps upload speed and if i’m uploading using that then my download speeds tank rendering my connection useless.
I’m moving in the next year and when i get a place with more than ADSL you bet i’m setting up a seedbox
I have now a ratio of 9.1 and 250TB of uploaded…
Also my hard drive is getting full. I guess I have to clean up some torrents soon.
Or buy new storage
Buy more storage. Cheers. Awesome ratio.
that’s a minimum of 27TB of storage, what kind of monster is your computer?
Thats really not that big in terms of a NAS. Some crazy fuckers on reddit had literal PETABYTES of storage.
To be fair tho, those people are an extreme outlier.
Yeah. Normal people have about 100tb of total space. My 96tb (64tb usable) of space is completely average and not at all an indicator of something being wrong or abnormal.
Maybe for Americans storage falls from trees, could you share what is this normal supermarket where I can buy 100tb of total space?
Oh. I was joking. I’m aware that my storage capabilities really are an outlier, even though I still feel inadequate whenever I go to a hoarding community.
I’ve spent around 1200$ USD since I started collecting things back on 2021, which is about 300/year, or 25/month. I don’t expect to purchase anymore for another three years or so, right around when a 24tb drive drops to 150/each. It’s still not like, super cheap or anything though.
Not saying its wrong, but most people probably don’t even approach 10tb. 100tb+ is definitely not the norm. Normies balk at my 50tb, and I’m definitely on the low end of data hoarding.
HDDs are getting massive. You could almost store all that on a single drive right now.
Nothing “almost” about it. Retail drives are available right now at 30tb. Although, the more reasonable price/GB is at around 8tb with occasional outliers.
Yeah i knew they were coming but last I saw they’d only released them in the mid 20TB range and was too lazy to look it up.
coughs in 50TB
Huh?
That are only 3 hard drives.
I bought myself parts for TrueNas.
1000 where half of it was the storage.
Buy more storage, but also… join private trackers when they open signups. You’d be amazing there.
Public tracker: You are the hero, getting a 30:1 upload ratio in a mere 30 days. “Wow, this shit is easy!”
Private tracker: “Please… can this torrent even reach 10% upload? It’s been an ENTIRE YEAR! I have 500 torrents in the same state!”
Most private trackers have some sort of bonus point system now where you earn points per hour of seeding per torrent, regardless of how much data you actually upload. You can then use those points to buy upload credit and raise your ratio
They have to. It’s a requirement, or everybody would quit in protest.
I never really understood private trackers TBH or rather the reason behind them. I like the idea of publicly sharing more anyway
There are some niche private trackers which have an active community that handle quality and requests. Also they don’t let just anyone create a torrent, so you can have assurances that the files have been vetted to some extent and you’re not going to download something unexpected.
The advantage of private trackers is that:
- torrents almost always have seeds
- you can ask for re-seeds in case they aren’t
- torrents have a good quality
- you’re less likely to receive a complaint letter from copyright holders
Already there
Thank you for your service.
god i even hate pausing seeding for even an hour cause i’m like BUT WHAT IF SOMEONE WANTS IT???
you’re the hero we don’t deserve
I don’t know about you guys, but I set mine to stop seeding at a 2.0 ratio. Give more than you get. That’s the way I think it should be.
True, unless you’re the only one seeding a particular thing. It’s good to keep media alive and available, especially obscure stuff.
Why would you do that? We should all keep on seeding as long as possible.
Cause I don’t have infinite storage. My seedbox has 4TB.
but seeding more does not cost storage. why not let it seed until you delete it?
if it’s so that you can see which ones can you delete, just click on the ratio column to sort by that, and check which ones have a higher ratio
Because most people aren’t using the files as stored in the download folder. They’re renaming it, moving it to another folder, and deleting all the extra files. So you’d have to store it twice basically.
This is one of the great things about the *arrs. They will create a hardlink to the file in your media folder structure so that you can keep seeding and have a well organized/named media library without wasting storage.
Prior to that, I also just saved my torrents directly to my media library, and used the torrent manager to rename the local file properly. Same thing effectively, just a lil more work.
As the other comment says, use hardlinks and then you can have several copies of the file across the same partition all reference the same file, using just the storage space needed for one copy of the file. Still RAR files will need to be extracted first, so those would require just about twice the file size, but hopefully people stop using rar, so that’s not a concern.
My media server is not the same as my seed box.
I’m guessing your seedbox is always on?
So why not use a shared folder?
If you’re copying a file to another server there’s still no reason to delete it on the seedbox until you have to.
No.
Seedboxes just arent (usually) used as streaming servers.
So we fetch the downloads from the server and purge unpopular/non-important torrentsHere’s a tip: after moving the folder (idk if this counts after renaming a folder or file, probably doesn’t), go into your torrent client and click Force Recheck on the torrent. it’ll recheck everything and continue seeding the file.
Valid, although I prefer the 24/7 seed to infinity method.
Depends on the torrent tbh, if it has loads of seeders already i don’t really care.
A better way is to just limit connections and upload speed and seed forever. If your total connections is like 25 and your max upload is like 100 KB/ps, it doesn’t affect your internet or anything although you should use a VPN and stuff, and it helps to keep those files out there with a complete source for a long time.
Highest I’ve seeded before stopping was 2000x, on about 30 or so titles. And everything from my home connection lol
The more seeders, the likelier I’ll probably give 2.0.
But I’ll keep everything seeded as long as I have storage available.Used to do this but now feel like it’s a net positive to just let it go and be a bigger cog in the antimachine.
Why is it called seeding but where is sperm in question?
We could call it breeding instead
«See, when two people on the internet love content very very much…»
There’s microplastics in my magnet link.
It’s more like trees.
I seed EVERYTHING until i run out of space. Qbitorrent doesn’t like me having .torrent files in more than one drive, so i’m limited to my 14TB. But i have dozens of torrents that i’m only one of 2 or 3 people seeding it, so those help me upload hundreds of GB’s with my terrible connection.
Also i’m on a private tracker, so leaving them seeding helps your ratio, even if you don’t actually upload anything. They just try to encourage new people to seed and that is awesome.
People should learn how to seed. If you don’t want to seed, just pay for Usenet.
It’s a shame Usenet has become fully paid. It’s what ultimately pushed me into torrents. And the fact that small communities don’t have all the content out there for you to download via Usenet.
Downloading large files from Usenet was paid pretty early on. If the core functionality of Usenet is now paid, this is news to me.
There weren open test servers though and sites with limited trials but no data limit.
That’s what I used back in the day. Sadly all these trial offers are gone now and demand credit card information upfront.
My dialup ISP in the 90s included Usenet.
Magical times before my own on Usenet.
What do you consider large files? Isn’t the article size usually limited to something like 1mb (it’s been a while since I used Usenet)?
So it would technically be about the number of articles rather than the eventual size of the combined archive? At the core it’s all still text right?
Pirated media(images, movies, ebooks, ROMs) uses binary posts, not text. There are different limits and retention policies for binary versus text articles, and most Usenet servers, particularly cheap or free ones, don’t host a lot of the categories a pirate would want at all.
Please don’t imply that all Usenet providers facilitate piracy.
Thanks for the pointer! I took the opportunity to learn a bit about more recent NNTP by reading the standard: RFC 3977. It looks like nntp v2 circa 2006 added MIME encoding, so I would guess that may be how a service provider would differentiate.
I haven’t used Usenet since the turn of the century. Back then it was all text (including every article under alt.binaries), and even pirated media needed to be split into a multi-part format (often rar) then each part uuencoded so it could be included in an article.
I mean, you made me look at it again myself, as the multi-part rar files on Usenet are still very much a thing. The allowable “article” sizes for binary content are larger than for text articles, but still too small for video or high-quality audio.
the second it says “Seeding”
Don’t worry, it will stall at 99.9% forever
I hate how relatable this is.
Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent Recheck torrent
Unfortunately my VPN provider doesn’t support Port Forwarding (they’re great in everything else, but suck on this) so if I just start seeding from scratch no peers will ever manage to connect to my machine. The only way I can contribute back to the community is when a Download session ends and starts seeding (basically all those peers that my machine checked during the download stage get recorded in the VPN’s Router NAT as associated with my machine so if they try to connect to my machine later, for example to download a block, they get through), so my torrents are just left to seed after downloading (if I stop it and start seeding later, it might not work anymore depending on how long has passed).
Fortunatelly I have a fast internet connection and torrenting is done in a server machine, so I just leave it setup to a 2:1 seeding ratio for as long as it takes to get there and pretty much all torrents I download reach that seeding ratio (it pretty much only fails to reach that on really obscure torrents with very small swarms).
I’ve been sailing the high seas for over 3 decades and long ago saw the importance of doing my bit to keep the whole ecosystem alive.
So I might not be seeding everything I have (and as it’s been 3 decades, I do have some stuff which is now very obscure), but everything I get from the community I seed 2x as much so that others can get it too.
I’ve been trying to understand port forwarding since I keep seeing that I need to set it up for my torrent client to work reliably. But I read that it sends your traffic “outside” of your VPN encryption. Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose or am I understanding it wrong?
In a VPN your own machine sits behind a Router from the VPN provider in a NAT configuration (meaning that during VPN tunnel initialization that router gives your machine an IP address from one of the so-called “internal” IP address range - most commonly one in the 192.168.x.x range - which are NOT valid to have visible in the Internet) and which multiple machines all over the world sitting behind other routers can use at the same time (for example: even though it only has 254 valid addresses, there are probably millions of machines running right now with an IP address in the 192.168.1.x range, which is by far the most popular range of internal IP addresses).
The IP address which is visible on the actual Internet has to be one which is not from an internal range or other kinds of special ones, and that’s the one that the VPN provider Router shows to the outside. (There are a few “tell me my IP address” websites out there which will let you know what that address is).
This is also how home routers work in providing multiple machines in your home access to the internet even though its on a single ISP connection which has only one IP address valid for the Internet.
To make all this work, such routers do something called NAT-Translation: connection requests from the INSIDE to the OUTSIDE go to the router, which changes ip:port information of those requests from the internal ip and a port in that machine to be the router external ip and a port the router has available, and then forwards the request the outside. The router also records this association between the external machine, the port the router used for it and the internal machine and the port on it the connection came from, on an internal table so that when the OUTSIDE machine connects to the router on that specific port, the router treats that inbound connection request as associated to the earlier outbound request and does the reverse translation - it forwards that inbound request to the internal machine and port of the original outbound connection.
However - all this only works when your machine first connects from the inside to an machine on the outside, because that’s when the router translates the IP address and Port and memorizes that association. If however you gave the IP address in some other way to that remote machine other than connecting to it via the router (for example, you have registered a Domain Name pointing to it, or you just gave the IP address and port number to a friend and told them “this is my Jellyfin machine”), any connection coming from the outside will not be routed by the router to your machine, because the router never had an original outbound connection to make the association for any return inbound connections: from its point of view some random machine is trying to connect to one if its ports and it simply doesn’t know which internal machine and on which port on it is supposed to get this connection from that unknown external machine.
Also all this is dynamic - after a while of one such association not being used, the router will remove it from memory.
Port Forwarding is a static way to explicitly configure in a router that all connections arriving at a specific port of the router are ALWAYS to be forwarded to a specific internal machine and a specific port on that machine.
Given that the association is static, you can give the outside world in any way you like without involving the router (for example, listing in some kind of shared list, which is what the Torrent protocol does), the IP of the router + the forwarded router port, as the address for a “service” that’s running on your internal machine, and any request coming from the outside on that port even if your machine never connected to that remote machine, ever gets forwarded to the internal machine and the port you configured there.
With port forwarding you can for example host your own website behind a VPN or in a home machine that’s not directly connected to the internet because any requests coming into a specific port on the router that does have a direct connection to the internet always get forward to that machine and the port on it you configured.
In the old days Port Forwarding had to be manually configured on the Router (for example, via a web-interface), but nowadays there is a protocol called uPNP that lets programs running on your machine automatically request that the router sets up a Port Forwarding for them so this is often done transparently, which how most networked applications sitting on a machine at home behind a home routers, work just fine since those routers always support port forwarding.
PS: All this shit is actually one enormous hack, that only exists because IPv4 doesn’t have sufficient IP addresses for all Internet connected machines in the World. The newer IPv6 does have more than enough, so it’s theoretically possible that all your machines get a valid Internet IPv6 address and are thus directly reachable without any NAT on the router and associated problems. However I’m not sure if VPN provides which do support IPv6 actually have things set-up to just give client machines a direct, valid on the Internet IP address, plus a lot of protocols and applications out there still only work with IPv4 (byte . byte . byte . byte) addresses.
Thank you for taking the time writing all this up for me. That makes me glad I asked because most info I was finding with google-foo was telling me to set up port forwarding the old way with my router and not really doing a good job of laying out how and why it works to begin with. After having switched from Tribbler to a client that has uPNP, now I think I understand why I’m struggling with it less. I’m unsure if my Soulseek is connected and sending data right but this gives me some better ideas of how to find out.
Never turn on uPnP for external use, its a way to let hackers manipulate your network. It should never have existed as an option.
You should have pretty much everything on your router disabled for access from machines on the external network side of the router.
The typical example is the web admin interface, which should never be enabled for access from outside, only for access from machines on your internal network. The same applies to all other sorts of control interface, be they human interfaces or machine interfaces.
For any machines reaching it from the outside network interface the router should look the same as the most basic, dumbest router there is with no way to configure or control it.
So, yeah, enabling uPnP for external use is asking to be hacked.
Our ISP ships new routers that are admined from the cloud via a phone app. Its a disaster waiting to happen, so I told them I’m keeping my old outdated modem as a bridge and bought my own router.
Yeah, I do the same thing.
Curiously, the installer of my ISP - which is one of the smaller ISPs around here - says it’s very common for their clients to just want the ISP’s box to do bridging (or even just act as a Fiber-modem) and use their own router behind it.
Guess the techies tend to flock to the more obscure ISPs that pretty much just provide “data pipe to the Internet” rather than use the big ISPs which tend to do stuff like push their own TV Boxes and even bundles of Home Internet + TV + Mobile.
I am very happy with this ISP - cheap, fast, reliable, no bullshit.
Yeah we had the bundle from a big ISP, home phone, TV, and unlimited internet and 10 email addresses. As kids moved out etc. We dumped home phone, and TV, just internet now as a bridge. I’d move to another provider but I still have 5 people using the email addresses; and for mine I’m slowly moving all my signups and bills over to another email so we can eventually make an easy switch.
Does your ISP not give your router a public (even if dynamic) IP? If not, then after your router you’d be double-natted right? Yuck!
My ISP does give my router a public IP.
However my VPN provider does not give my client machines public IPs and instead gives them internal IPs.
So from any machine in my home, my normal (via ISP) connection is via my own router (which does NAT for all machines in my home network and which I fully control) which has a public IP address on its external interface (so, no double NAT), whilst a VPN connection is via the VPN provider’s router (as that’s what’s on the other end of the VPN pipe) which also does NAT, but that router I don’t control and the VPN provider I use doesn’t allow Port Forwarding hence all the trickery I described above to make sure I actually seed more than I download.
Around here ISPs giving internal addresses is not very common unless it’s on a mobile connection.
I suffer with seeding unpopular torrents and rarely see my ratio even each 1.0
I mostly seed stuff that’s on the verge of being lost media and my ratio is often insane because there just aren’t other seeds. Ironically for many old/unpopular films the Internet Archive is a lot better than any torrents.
The comment on this internet archive review in particular had me laughing.
internet archive is amazing; i found a 100gb woodstock 94 bootleg vhs collection of the 3 day ppv recording and it took like 2 days to download despite only having 1-2 seeders
what was your highest rate? A ratio of 3x ?
I would seed if people ever used me. I only have so much space, and everytime I try to seed, there’s either nobody downloading, or theirs a hundred other seeders.
Have you checked if you have the port used by your torrent software forwarded?
You guys go out and talk to girls? Disgusting, they have cooties.
Ones with pp are peak
I used to seed in the old days, but I feel it has become more complicated now.
The primary issue (before eg.: CGNAT or port-opening issues) is it’s become more and more often the case that I post-process what I download before use (rename / reencode music albums, reencode movies) so it makes little sense to keep the old files only for seeding. In theory a “seedbox” (those are the trendy thing this decade, right?) would help solve this, but I’m still rather new and have not found any FOSS, PII-free offerings in the market.
Exactly the situation I’m facing. Despite torrents being a popular choice, it just doesn’t provide an easy way to manage your seeds.
Of course I have found some potential solutions. Seedbox is one of them. There’s also the *arr suite, which is a more local solution that utilises hard links - but im not sure if it’ll be effective if you want to reencode.
I have an *arr suite back at home (and had one back at work, once). It’s quite local yes but I feel that to be to its advantage in this case since it’s for downloading, not uploading. No advantage if I want to reencode, since in an *arrsetup you just post-process the files as usual and remove the originals. OTOH, you can easily connect it to your Jellyfin, mpd, etc…, but by that point I just connect the folder with the post-processed stuff.
Exactly this. I don’t need 1080P or 4k mp4 rips with 10bit audio, and I definitely don’t have the storage for it, but when that’s all that is seeding, its usually quicker to just download it and re-encode.
This pretty much. I’ve never understood the point of something like
The_Avengers.[4K][8K][16][Dolby_7.18_3D][128subs].mkv… what, do people want to take note of The Hulk’s groin warts?For stuff like animation content, even 720p is too much unless it’s content from the last ~5 years. Anything before Infinity Train does pretty well on 540p or 480p with 96k audio, and if I’m looking for a movie from the 80s, let alone a black-and-white from the 50s, I’m certainly not interested in a 8K rip that would naturally have to be an AI upscale.
I kinda started a “seedbox” for at least my niche torrents. Most of the mainstream things I download I don’t normally leave to seed that long as there’s already plenty seeding, but a lot of the documentaries or other things that only have single or double digits seeding I’ll make a copy and leave it to seed for a while. I used to host my Plex server from that PC and when I build my new dedicated server I left the storage intact, but transferred my whole library over, so I have a large amount of unused space doing nothing else.
I’m also fairly new to all this. I’m now using Jellyfin for selfhosting. What’s the benefit of enencoding everything?
In my experience at least, the two primary benefits (and sometimes, the only benefits) of re-encoding are 1.- reduced file size and 2.- increased device compatibility.
The file size is relevant because you can fit more stuff for essentially the same quality: reencoding a FLAC album to ~160k Opus uses up only 1/5th to 1/4th of the space, ~196k Opus is 1/4th to 1/3rd of the space, so it can be a pretty good gain on aggregate. A movie in 4K is worth nearly 6 movies in 1080p and nearly 9 movies in 720p, and for ~95% of extant content in the world rebasing down from 4K to at least 1080p presents no practical loss.
The compatibility is usually only relevant when you want to have that content be easily accessible in eg.: a remote media server, a streaming system, or one of those gool ol’reliable MP3 thumbsticks. In those cases, you’d be reencoding audio from FLAC to MP3 to increase device compatibility (and getting some decent space savings too). If your Jellyfin server’s connection is over wifi or you’ll access the data outside of your local network, re-encoding to lower sizes means transmission requires less bandwidth, as well as other savings (incl.: energy consumption in aggregate).
