I'd be interested to learn about the software that created the ASCII version of the movie. Is there a simple way to do this, or would they have made something custom?
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World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
11–20 of 114 posts
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#12I'd be interested to learn about the software that created the ASCII version of the movie. Is there a simple way to do this, or would they have made something custom?
aalib + mplayer would be my guess.
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#13This reminds me of that ASCII Star Wars telnet thing. How long has that been around for?
I believe you're referring to http://www.blinkenlights.nl/services.html (or 'telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl', as it's more popularly known).
On the authors bio page it says he started creating it in 1997.
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#14Actually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.
I think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move and rename the files to fit into an organized collection, but then the client won't be able to find it anymore. If my client were able to track files across moves and renames, I'd be much more willing to seed things permanently. (It would also need to have good…
I've "solved" this by having torrents go to a "Torrents" folder, then symlinking those files into my organized collection.
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#15I'd be interested to learn about the software that created the ASCII version of the movie. Is there a simple way to do this, or would they have made something custom?
ffmpeg can output ascii videos
Whilst this statement is true, the torrent predates the earliest versions of ffmpeg, so it wouldn't have been what was used (which was what the OP was asking).
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#16Actually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.
I think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move and rename the files to fit into an organized collection, but then the client won't be able to find it anymore. If my client were able to track files across moves and renames, I'd be much more willing to seed things permanently. (It would also need to have good…
You can deal with the renaming issue with a bunch of symlinks. It's pretty easy to script that up.
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#17This reminds me of that ASCII Star Wars telnet thing. How long has that been around for?
The telnet version seems to be from 2001, but the ASCII work has been since 1999 at least.
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not really torrents. The problem is that seeds are ephemeral. But an equally ephemeral source for any protocol will always make the availability of the resource low. The solution is not to change the protocol; the solution is to have less ephemeral sources.
The Internet Archive might be a good host for rare (and not copyright infringing) torrents.
It actually is, because it already provide torrent access to its content. See, for example, the Matrix ASCII (only the sample though):
https://archive.org/details/TheMatrix-InAscii
(1 more point for how terrific the Internet Archive is)
EDIT: it turns out the complete Matrix ASCII is hosted on the IA, making its availability a non-problem for years to come, even though it's not the original torrent anymore
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#19Slightly off topic, but I find the fascination with ASCII-arting things interesting.
I grew up in the days of 2400 baud modems and even ran a BBS briefly. At the time, ASCII art was the only thing you could do to differentiate yourself.
Nowadays I suppose it's a combination of nostalgia and ease of transferring since pretty much every system ever has a way of reading ASCII.
But I wonder how long the trend will last -- the majority of internet users don't have "nostalgia" for ASCII anymore [0] and there are at least a few image and video formats that are becoming almost as ubiquitous as ASCII readers.
[0] I was recently on a discussion with some folks I used to work with at university about how our old workplace was no longer offering shell accounts to the students because they weren't being used. This made us all sad since most of us learned all of our command line foo at that workplace.
Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move and rename the files to fit into an organized collection, but then the client won't be able to find it anymore. If my client were able to track files across moves and renames, I'd be much more willing to seed things permanently. (It would also need to have good…
I've "solved" this by having torrents go to a "Torrents" folder, then symlinking those files into my organized collection.
I do the same thing but into multiple folders with a unionfs in read-only mode so I don't accidentally modify the files and cause them to be re-downloaded