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World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

torrentfreak.com

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#41
post #40

For those of us who feel uncomfortable going to torrentfreak on a work computer, what is the torrent?

> A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is the oldest known torrent that's still active. Created more than 12 years ago, the file has outlived many blockbuster movies and is still downloaded a few times a week, even though the site from where it originated has disappeared.

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#43
post #38

I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media. I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release…

You should probably also know about the "Despecialized" editions of the original trilogy which removes the CGI crap and restores the original movies (more or less) as they were, with some color correction and other odds and ends.

> with some color correction and other odds and ends.

So they removed Luca's artistic touches and replaced them with their own?

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably also know about the "Despecialized" editions of the original trilogy which removes the CGI crap and restores the original movies (more or less) as they were, with some color correction and other odds and ends.

> with some color correction and other odds and ends. So they removed Luca's artistic touches and replaced them with their own?

No, the goal is to remove Lucas' artistic touches and get as close as possible to the original theatrical releases. Color correction means reversing all the color changes that Lucas made to the movies. Where higher quality film of a scene exists, they splice it in. Etc. If you google a bit you can find a detailed explanation of the changes.

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#46
post #19

Slightly 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 -…

There's still a semi-active community: https://artpacks.org

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#47
post #33
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make it work i think the client should have some hard drive space allocated for the purpose of "preservation" , which he can automatically use according to some reasonable policy(maybe only files i downloaded can be put in the folder) and it should allocate some share of my bandwidth for that purpose. Than the client automatically manages everything with coordination from the network. That's the only way this can…

There are distributed data stores that work just like this. IPFS ( https://ipfs.io/ ) is a recent effort, while Freenet ( https://freenetproject.org/ ) has been around for a while. Whether this can be retrofitted into Bittorrent not clear. Conceivably one could write a bridge between IPFS and Bittorrent such that an IPFS url could serve as an "IPFS seed" much like a HTTP url can serve as a BEP 19 webseed.

It could work, but wouldn't it be simpler , as a first step, to add this feature in a basic form to a python based BT client like tribler and see where it goes from there ? I.e.

1. At torrent delete , set a flag on torrent to hide

2. At torrent display , don't display hidden torrents

3. Periodically or on storage_full event - fully delete hidden torrents , based on some simple strategy like "remove those with most seeds" ?

And after building it and testing a bit , creating some nice web page , a bit of marketing , and gather developers/users ? Who knows, might become popular .

Might have tried to do so myself , but i'm not really a developer.

Anyway, is it realistic?

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send to him "The Phatom Edit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit . It is already widespread all over the internet (even in youtube) and has the same objetive of your edition (Jar Jar binks is gone as well).

How did I not know that existed? I named mine "The Gungan Minus". We watched it together on Christmas Eve.

There's a bunch of Phantom Edits; the name's been reused several times. The one I watched was this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LEhOZZbuk

All three prequel movies edited down into a single 2-hour film. And you know what? It's actually... still not what you'd call good. But it's embarrassingly better than the originals.

But there are others, like the Phantom Re-edit, which tries to improve on characters like Jar-Jar and the Trade Federation by scrambling their speech into traditional Star Wars Alien, and subtitling them. With different dialogue. It's supposed to be pretty good, but I've never tracked down a copy.

I do wonder if the lasting legacy of the terrible prequels will turn out to be teaching an entire generation about film editing!

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The algorithm dosent need to be too complex. You basically look at each still frame as grayscale, generate a hashtable of brightness values mapping to monospaced characters, and convert each grayscale pixel to a character.

You can do better than that by taking advantage of character shapes, though. Minimal example: () and: )( have the same brightness values, but we see them pretty differently. Ideally you would use edge detection, maybe some object detection, and then be willing to compromise a little on brightness in order to make important edges nice. I don't know if there's software out there that does this, though.

A better example would be ( vs ), checking neighboring pixels to weight that pixel correctly.

Re: World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

#50
post #2

Actually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.

In the good old days of using (Napster|Audiogalaxy|Gnutella) I could point the file-sharing application to my collection and presto - it was all shared and available to whoever was interested. Nowadays, I just share whatever torrent I have participated in lately, plus a few that seem popular but rare (those most uploaded from my client) - but I have a whole lot of rather rare music that I fail to share for lack of a way to do it. Is there a contemporary way to share a whole collection or is that really missing from the toolset ?

Well - maybe I'll finally get around to setting up a heeadless gtk-gnutella node again.

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