Digging into today's peer-to-peer apps

[vsp]

I'm trying to dig up video files (DivX, VCD, whatever) for some of my favorite cartoons -- Freakazoid, the Tick, Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, the Mighty Heroes, etc. Most of these are commercially unavailable, and I have little with which to tempt the tape-trader contingent.

Therefore, I took the plunge yesterday and tried out one of the modern peer-to-peer apps, eDonkey. I hadn't used any major P2P apps since Napster folded, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.

What I found was about what I did expect -- hordes of users, very slow connections, and about a 90/10 ratio of porn to non-porn content. Not that I have philosophical issues with porn, mind you, but its effects on bandwidth are obvious. When 4,281 people are all trying to download 700MB teen_doing_three_guys_and_a_donkey.mpg movies at once, things grind to a halt very quickly. (The MPAA has little to worry about; sure, there are movies on these servers, but by the time a download would complete the movie would already be out on video.)

Anyway, no sign of anything I wanted, though that's always subject to who's online at any given time.

I've shied away from Kazaa, given their adventures in distributed computing, and have heard that Gnutella has security issues. (Not that I'm running ANYTHING that I get off of a P2P site without three virus-scans and an electron-microscope examination.) Are there any other P2P sources I should look to?

(USENET seems the best bet for now -- dramatically faster downloads, though you're obviously limited to what others choose to post there.)

LimeWire works for me. Your mileage may vary.

[juju]

I think that the best Gnutella client for Linux is gtk-gnutella. It has great filtering rules, and it's much faster than Limewire (at least on my 700mhz Duron). Also, when you're downloading from someone, it tells you whether or not they're running Morpheous, gnut, gtk-gnutella, Limewire, or whatever. Although that's not really useful information, I just think it's hella cool.

I've found that with Gnutella, you really need broadband for it to work well. I usually load it up and let it sit there for about 10 minutes before I try searching for anything. That gives it ample opportunity to find other servers.

For Windows, I think that the best client is Gnucleus. I've never tried E-Donkey or Kazaa, so I can't comment on those.

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by vsp
and have heard that Gnutella has security issues.

Are you talking about a particular Gnutella client, or the network in general? I don't see how the Gnutella network can be any more or less secure than any other P2P system; it's really more of a protocol that individual clients can implement well or not-so-well.

I use mutella, which was "inspired by" gnut, but is much better and has a hella-cool web remote GUI, so if I was the kind of person who downloaded music and posted to internet BBSes while at work, I could theoretically do that without worrying about my employer's silly firewall.

But I assume you're wanting a Windows client, so I'd look into LimeWire and Bearshare, two of the more popular Gnutella clients. As far as content, I've never had too much of a problem finding what I was looking for, but sometimes that means letting a search run for hours before someone shows up with what I want.

[SteveDallas]

This site may or may not have information you're not already aware of.. I believe most of the stuff listed here is transmitted thru Usenet rather than the P2P nets. I glanced at it because I read that they had MST3K episodes; I have no idea if they have any of the shows you're interested it.

[vsp]

Originally posted by kbarger
This site may or may not have information you're not already aware of.. I believe most of the stuff listed here is transmitted thru Usenet rather than the P2P nets. I glanced at it because I read that they had MST3K episodes; I have no idea if they have any of the shows you're interested it.

That's actually the site that got the ball rolling on my end. I went looking for Freakazoid DivX archives, found their listings, and the poster said "They're on the Donkey."

Ahhh... a little more research on my part just revealed that I need to connect to a _specific_ eDonkey server -- they don't contact each other. This may make digging up those files easier.

I played around with Gnucleus last night, and it was certainly friendlier than eDonkey at first glance (though, again, eDonkey may be much better when I know where to look). About 19 out of every 20 downloads simply froze at "Waiting", which doesn't surprise me at all, but I did get one Tick episode through the gridlock.

I was VERY amused to see that some files I created and renamed a couple of years ago (some Bill Hicks live tracks) popped right up when I searched for Hicks, with my distinctive names intact. Napster lives, just with a new name and address.

[vsp]

And after a frantic weekend of downloading (one MST3K episode, a couple of MST3K shorts and 10 1/2 Freakazoid episodes), my verdict is:

eDonkey is a wonderful tool for hitting a server that "whitelists" files, i.e. only allows specified content to be traded. The Digital Archive Project server is a perfect example of this. This weeds out bandwidth-killing pr0n traders and ensures that if you download a complete file, you're getting the file you expected and the full version of it.

It allows you to download (or upload) chunks of a large file, instead of grabbing the entire thing as one immense unit. You may have 100MB of a 700MB MST3K episode, be downloading the remaining 600MB from four different people at once, and have two other people pulling the first 100MB off of YOUR machine simultaneously. Not too shabby.

eDonkey servers do not communicate with each other. As such, it's somewhat akin to a peer-to-peer FTP -- if you know where to look, you can find all sorts of things. If you are hitting eDonkey servers randomly, you'll find random content, and have a much lower finding-what-you-want/download-successfully hit rate that's comparable to Gnutella searches.

Gnucleus (a Gnutella front-end, which can contact servers for Kazaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, et al) works better than eDonkey if you don't have a specific server in mind; since it searches nearly endlessly, the odds are decent of finding SOMEBODY out there with files you're looking for. Actually obtaining those files is another matter entirely. The phrase "Waiting, more hosts needed" will be burned into your skull after a few sessions, though I strongly suspect that all P2P software will be like this.

Partial files abound. Person A puts up a movie file, let's say, and person B downloads 23% before being cut off. Persons C through R now download the 23% version from B and each other. This makes it very difficult to find full versions and verify that they're full before you waste your time downloading them, unless the files' owners use decent naming conventions.

On the plus side, I now have TMPGEnc, Nero 5.5 and VirtualDub working overtime to whip up Video CDs of most of the shows I'm downloading. My DVD player (a Sony NS-300) isn't supposed to read CDRs, but apparently those with light aqua bottoms are compatible. Fujifilm 80-minute blanks are working great.

I'm still partial to USENET for file distribution (80KB/sec for me compared to 10-15 on a good day over P2P, and .PAR files help repair incomplete sections), but not everyone has a reliable news server or one that carries certain groups, and even good newsfeeds are only as good as the content others choose to post.

[Articrono]

Sure, it's four years later, but... I want Freakazoid! I've been to DAP, I've tried to use the eDonkey.. I just get missing files from the links or queue spot 1,250/1,250. Is there any other way to get the show? Or am I just doing it incorrectly?

[Perry Winkle]

The standard BitTorrent client has been massively upgraded. I use it and a torrent tracker site.

http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.torrentreactor.net/
(there are many others but I'm not _that_ into it)

[Troubleshooter]

I use Shareaza.

I like it, but you can let it monopolize your pipe if you're not careful.

When you connect to another client, either through a search or to actually download, it tells you the program they are using and lets you chat with the user or browse their shared files.

Here's there features splash:

Shareaza is the most luxurious and sophisticated file sharing system you'll find. It can harness the power of up to four separate peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, including EDonkey2000, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Shareaza's native network, Gnutella2 (G2).

Not only that, but Shareaza is completely FREE and won't show any annoying ads or pop-ups. It won't install any unwanted third party programs that can wreak havoc with your computer. No spyware, no registration, no "paid version". Just download and use. Simple.

[Articrono]

I use BitTornado as my client, with www.isohunt.com and www.mininova.org as my primary trackers. I wasn't able to find any episodes with either of those, or at the two sites listed by Grant. I was, however, able to find a few episodes floating around in Shareaza.

Thanks, guys!

[Happy Monkey]

( The Tick is now running opposite the Daily Show on Toon Disney. )

[Bullitt]

LimeWire or BearShare for individual music files, SoulSeek for whole albums, and torrentspy.com for movies and games