Hate when it happens

101 comments

Don't worry, some hero without a cape will appear for you and seed that bitch! (wait, that sound better in my head).
- Once or twice I've gone and found another source for the download, copied it into my torrents folder, forced my torrent client to re-scan the file and started seeding it.
  Watching a thousand other clients tick over from 99% to 'seeding' is weirdly gratifying.
  
  Not all hero's wear capes. Also just so you know there's a script which does this automatically
- Sounds fine to me.
  
  Phew, thanks.
- I recently had a torrent finish after a year and a half. It wasn't something I was really concerned about but it gave me a nice feeling to know it had finished.
  
  What in tarnation? who did that to you, what monster....
  what in the world compelled you to want it that way?
- Hehe it's coming soon

Check the files included in the torrent. Sometimes the folders include a little readme or something that people set to not download.
- Why do people do this? Readmes and nfo files take up literal kilobytes.... even over hundreds or even thousands of downloads, at most it's going to take up a few extra megabytes of download/storage, they're not saving anything at all. And it can be nice when the nfo includes all the releaser's original encode settings and stuff.
  
  Extra files are messy.
  
  Why do I need to know that “Torrent was downloaded from TheSiteINeverVisited.nfo”? It's just extra noise I don't need.
  
  ¯(ツ)/¯
- Yea sometimes I'll exclude the .nfo from my downloads. Thankfully the tracker I'm on now disallows any files that aren't media in their uploads.
  
  But nfos are useful
  
  Are srt files also disallowed?
- Yes I've even had a video file stop at 99.9% and it still played just fine.
  
  For video files I always set it to download first and last parts of files first. You can watch a video fairly well with like 50% downloaded if the file has the first and last section, which contain the data about how the video is stored. It'll have occasional glitches, but it mostly works. At 99% it's effectively all there and you may not even notice that last 1%, let alone 0.1%.

Could be me seeding the entire torrent except the readme file
- Lmfao. Hilarious.
- The annoying thing about this is that automated systems (like Radarr/Sonarr) will never get notified that it's complete, then.
  
  If you go to your torrent client and disable the missing file, it should get reported as "complete" to the *arrs. Manual and annoying, but it works.
- thanks

I've done the math for how long it'd take to randomly guess the last several kilobytes until something checksummed correctly.
I was not pleased with the answer.
- That would put those crypto miners to better use at least
- You know I never thought of that.. but yeah that would be a good very very very very large number.
  Like throwing puzzle pieces in the air and getting it to land completed.
- On average it'll take 2^{(n-1) guesses to reconstruct 2}n bits, so... depends on how many hashes / sec you can do.
  
  Let me save you some time: not enough.
- wait until you hear about collisions (missing more bits than your hash output length guarantees a collision on average)
- If its a piece at the beggining or end of the file it would likely be significantly easier

What's even worse is when a torrent is stalled at around 94%, there's exactly one seeder with a full copy in the peer list, but he has fucked up networking rules (or an intentionally choked upload because he's a dirty leecher) so that despite having an open connection in the peer list, they never send any data...
- This seems to happen alot. I always wondered if it is really a peer or some weird spoofed peer that just tries to give you hope before crushing your dreams.
  
  Most likely it's someone who has a VPN that doesn't support P2P upload or has their config messed up.
- What do you consider choked? I know a lot of people do not have good upload speeds regardless of what the download speeds are.
  
  Choked, as in turned to 0b/s
  
  anything under about 20kb/s is pretty much dead on the larger torrents.... a lot of people will turn down their upload limits so that protocol traffic can pass but actual pieces never get sent. It's irritating to say the least.
- i had a similar one, godawful speed (i don't remember how much, but it was measured in single or double digit kbit/s) and turned on their computer when i went to bed, and off exactly when i came back from work.
  ended up leaving the computer on the whole day for a few days. this guy owes me 5 bucks.
  
  If he's the single seed left on a torrent, chances are he's the last seed on a bunch of other torrents as well, and his bandwidth is being choked by everyone who wants his stuff.

Want to be honest here, my real pet peeve is that it shows 100%. Ever. At all. Let alone when it hangs there... That's just insulting.
If it is 100% complete, I should not be waiting for anything. If I were ever developing an operating system I would never allow for 100% to display on a progress bar. 100% means it's done. We advance to the next screen. Do not display it. It makes no sense.
- I do often desire a "click to continue" option, especially helpful for asynchronous tasks. Start a render, and when you get back it says 100% without you having to look at the output folder, for instance. I get what you mean though, it certainly should say 100% unless it's totally donezo. Probably lazy rounding errors in some cases (Microsoft products are the worst at showing accurate progress bars)
  
  I would say a click to continue screen would count as a next screen in the context of what I'm talking about.
  I guess I should have been more clear as to say, it should never say 100%, and still be in the loading loop.
- Im 101% done with 100% progress bars
- maybe display it for the user for half a second. but nothing else.
  my3d printer does this on long prints too, it'll say 100% for up to 10 minutes when it's a really long print. makes no goddamn sense.
  probably rounding shit in the software and a lack of care on the manufacturer's side.
  
  I'm just saying that in the world of zeros and ones, a one should never be a zero.

Part of why I moved to usenet.
Everything always downloads at full speed (limited by disc write speed in my case), so if there's missing data you find out about it within a min or two instead of after 3 days of trying.
Usenet also includes parity data so you can rebuild missing data to an extent.
- Till you're missing that one article.
  
  Yup, point is I find out much much sooner and can move on to a new nzb. A single ~15gb nzb takes 5min max whether it succeeds or not. I'm never ever waiting on slow seeds.
  Multiple providers can improve availability, but I've seen no need. Everything myself or my users have requested has been found and downloaded within 25min, including re-tries. Typically it's about 15min from user request to 'available to watch' email notification.
  Worse case I can fallback to torrents, but I haven't had to yet with over 31tb out of usenet alone.
- I use both. A lot of stuff just isn't on usenet.
  
  For the few things I can't find; there's still torrents. Usenet is just my primary source, and it covers 99% of what gets requested through my systems.
- I'm on private trackers and we don't have problems either.
  
  Private trackers can be a bitch to get into, and you have to re-seed what you download exposing yourself to copyright claimants and/or pay for a vpn on top.
  I just raw dog a usenet server for 5min/movie and I'm done. Faster, easier, and risk free.

If it's a video, you can probably still watch it
- It's usually just an nfo or srt file that one seeder has deleted
  One time I added a subtitle file to the download folder, renamed to the same as the movie file, and the download percentage jumped to completed
  
  I wish people would adopt torrent V2 because that one missing 500 byte file can make the video unwatchable. With V2 each file has it's own sha256 hash and can be checked and shared individually. It would also improve torrent health.
  
  My point was that partially downloaded MP4, MKV and AVI files are usually playable

You should get your money back!

Force Recheck.
I have a lot of these just go to 100% after checking the downloaded files.

Yarr you need some wind in yer sails matey

What does the 0.1% of the file contain anyway, if it's a video and most of the data is there it might be either playable or if not it probably might be able to be repairable so it can play, albeit with minor corruption in the damaged part.
- Video files can be played with as little as 5% downloaded, so long as the header and footer are complete
  
  Can those be reconstructed if necessary?
- Definitely had some luck with this with videos. Hit or miss, but worth a go

BitTorrent has partial seeding. So if someone extends a torrent with some files, the original one can still be used for seeding.
Another reason for the last bit being the slowest is because populars chunks are downloaded first.