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Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2019 8:45 pm
by Subham
Many of us are from third-world countries, poor countries, developing countries,etc where unlimited internet is a luxury. We cant always afford huge data-packs that our ISPs offer. Its needed that we break a huge download, say ~30GB, into several parts so several people can download those parts of it in much lesser time. And those partial downloads can be, without error, be combined on any one system, and completed.
Third party apps already exist that combine split files (like FFSJ), and some that specifically combine partially downloaded torrents.

And dont worry over the fact that this simple feature will become obsolete soon, or wont get used by many.. because it will be worth all our time while it exists. Me and my friends especially. So please..    :|

XD

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:49 pm
by rafall93123
You taking about something like lan peer but without lan? for example. You download first 10% about of data and your friends random data 30%. Hi's bring data on pendrive and program scan pendrive location and download the date to your's drive or better synchronization yours data?

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2019 1:36 am
by Subham
No i dont mean synchronization. Most people from many developing countries can still not afford 10 mbps lans or 4g mobile connections. So please dont talk about what speedy lan you have. What I requested, is to be able to choose a range of packets from the whole file. So others in my group can all share the burden. You are talking about combining lan and hotspot. I am talking about using much more than 2 hotspots for the same download. So we dont need workarounds buddy. Consider this: a file is 80GB. Then at the network speed of 1 mbps, it will take me 9 hours. But actually it will take me 80 days just because the company allows a daily 1GB quota. If 10 of my friends download different parts of the same file, we will do 10gb a day. which means the whole torrent will finish in just 8 days, instead of those 80. Tell me how much do you expect me to download using your idea now?

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 6:53 am
by MastarPete
Subham wrote: Fri Sep 27, 2019 1:36 am No i dont mean synchronization. Most people from many developing countries can still not afford 10 mbps lans or 4g mobile connections. So please dont talk about what speedy lan you have. What I requested, is to be able to choose a range of packets from the whole file. So others in my group can all share the burden. You are talking about combining lan and hotspot. I am talking about using much more than 2 hotspots for the same download. So we dont need workarounds buddy. Consider this: a file is 80GB. Then at the network speed of 1 mbps, it will take me 9 hours. But actually it will take me 80 days just because the company allows a daily 1GB quota. If 10 of my friends download different parts of the same file, we will do 10gb a day. which means the whole torrent will finish in just 8 days, instead of those 80. Tell me how much do you expect me to download using your idea now?
@Subham I understand what you're asking and it seemed like "rafall93123" did as well. Data import is the better term to use but synchronize doesn't seem completely wrong either especially if you were to let the torrent clients handle transferring the data on an offline wifi/lan network. rafall93123 was simply asking for clarification if that was part of your intended use case and not trying to insult you and your country's economic situation.

You're asking for an expanded version of the "Download pieces sequentially" interface or additional menu option that offers finer manual control over the sequence of chunks to be downloaded or ignored.

Your use case. You and your "XX number" of friends can each be on your own internet connections and download unique portions of the same torrent without worrying about wasting data due to downloading overlapping pieces/chunks. You'd then like to be able to combine the data the next time you meet up with each friend in an offline manner, possibly using some other program to handle the data import. Technically speaking, you could use local peer exchange or manually add a peer by IP address on a privite wifi without internet and the torrent clients would handle the data exchange without the need of a separate data import app.

Download XX to XXXX sequence of pieces is trivial and built into the bittorrent protocol and the underlying libraries that allow qbittorrent to work. Whether or not the devs implement it in the GUI is a different matter as it could be too far outside of their planned feature list. That said I think it would be an interesting feature to have exposed in the GUI but overall I can see it being a low priority to the devs.


You may be better off switching to a command line torrent client that has "download XX through XXXXX" chunks available as a command line option, it's probably something that's normally only actually used in debug testing though so you'll need to do some research.

If you and your friends are all using mobile hotspots for internet you might be better off combining your resources and give one person all the hotspots you plan to use and have them do the downloading and switching between hotspots as the data pools are used up. if you can get a hold of a decent router that supports Dual WAN with round-robin mode then your torrent client traffic will be split between two hotspots which will expand the available bandwidth. A really good router could potentially Multi-WAN round-robin 6+ different connections if not many more, but cost and availability in your region becomes the issue.

Honestly though If it's not possible to have one person do the download I think you'd be better installing qbittorrent on a USB stick and have the torrent data saved there as well. Then pass that USB stick around to your friends to do the download. It may not be "8 days fast" but it'll certainly be faster than "80 days".

good luck!

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:40 pm
by Peter
The idea is not BAD per se, although, you could just download and stop your download at some point. Then continue.
This only works on a single internet connection though indeed.

I believe there is no such client, but maybe, you could write one yourself using libtorrent-rasterbar (the one that qBittorrent uses) or libtorrent-rakshasa (rtorrent's engine). I tried to check the dev documentation/API of each but well I didn't have much time. I am sure it could be done. Like split each download between X pieces and grab 1/6th of the torrent let's say.

Few caveats:
- You can't use a new peer ID since trackers won't whitelist you. You must fake it. This can cause your account to get banned.
- This would be only suitable for downloads I suppose...

Would be a nice project though...

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:46 am
by bmn
Isn't this feature in the baseline protocol already? As long as you don't request parts in sequential order, client will negotiate random parts so the WAN burden is already shared among LAN clients (presumed you are preferring LAN peers over WAN peers by not limiting "local" bandwidth). But I must say it isn't cost-effective at all, the single and more capable WAN link is much cheaper than multiple incapable ones.

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2020 5:40 am
by MastarPete
bmn wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:46 am Isn't this feature in the baseline protocol already? As long as you don't request parts in sequential order, client will negotiate random parts so the WAN burden is already shared among LAN clients (presumed you are preferring LAN peers over WAN peers by not limiting "local" bandwidth). But I must say it isn't cost-effective at all, the single and more capable WAN link is much cheaper than multiple incapable ones.
Yes, it's at the core of the protocol but torrent clients don't provide chunk level download control to end users in the way the Subham is asking.
They only provide an option to download or ignore individual files but that won't be of any use on a torrent that only has a single large file like an ISO or zip/rar and it doesn't allow for the torrent to be evenly split between a group of people.

Also Subham is NOT talking about torrent clients in a LAN setting with a shared WAN.
He's seeking a way to bypass the ISPs daily 1Gb transfer quota by coordinating with friends to split the overall download which will also cut down on the overall time it takes to download large torrents. That would only be possible if the torrent client could be told what portion of the overall torrent it should download.

Subham would like this kind of scenario to be possible.
Everyone starts their download at the same time on Monday. Each at their own home with independent 1Mbps internet connections with 1gb daily transfer quota.
Subham downloads 0% through 24.99%
Friend A downloads 25% through 49.99%
Friend B downloads 50% through 74.99%
Friend C downloads 75% through 100%
By Saturday each of their downloads is complete and Subham coordinates with each friend to get their portion of the torrent using an offline or LAN method.


The OP's scenario aside. Chunk level control could be nice on a large torrent when lets say your transfer got corrupted in a way that isn't getting caught by the client. Normally you'd have to start the whole thing over or if you know what portion is bad, use a hex editor and zero out the bad portion(s) of the files, which gets tedious when multiple files are involved.

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:40 am
by bmn
MastarPete wrote: Tue Jan 14, 2020 5:40 am Subham is NOT talking about torrent clients in a LAN setting with a shared WAN.
I didn't talk about that as well. I talked about Subham and all of his friends using their own dedicated WAN links. Presumed there are 4 friends and quota is 1GiB they all get up to 4GiB each (breakdown: 1GiB from WAN peers, up to 3GiB from LAN peers). Normally distributed random and rarest part first strategies will minimize part duplication.

Gonna mention it again: using four dedicated 1GiB WAN links this way is just a waste of money when one can pay for one shared 4GiB.
MastarPete wrote: Tue Jan 14, 2020 5:40 am using an offline
Are we seriously discussing a Floppynet support in 2020?
There is an almost infinite number of more important features to implement, really...

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 4:10 am
by MastarPete
I didn't talk about that as well. I talked about Subham and all of his friends using their own dedicated WAN links. Presumed there are 4 friends and quota is 1GiB they all get up to 4GiB each (breakdown: 1GiB from WAN peers, up to 3GiB from LAN peers). Normally distributed random and rarest part first strategies will minimize part duplication.

Gonna mention it again: using four dedicated 1GiB WAN links this way is just a waste of money when one can pay for one shared 4GiB.
Okay, the way you mention LAN at the same time made it seem like you thought they were all in the same building, maybe I just misread. I did suggest just pooling resources but Subham has only hinted at what his options are. It's also entirely possible the ISP charges much more for it's higher data quota tiers than the cost of four separate plans. Also consider there are other people in each of the friends household that want internet access that makes pooling impractical especially if they're spread across town.


Are we seriously discussing a Floppynet support in 2020?
There is an almost infinite number of more important features to implement, really...
In a third world country, it might as well be mid 90s for all I know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree though that full blown floppynet support is not worth the devs time and not even needed.
However some kind of GUI based Chunk control might be nice for other reasons than enabling floppynet, at a lower dev priority.

Re: Feature Request: Download a chosen range of packets (PLEASE!)

Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 4:51 pm
by bmn
MastarPete wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2020 4:10 am entirely possible the ISP charges much more for it's higher data quota tiers than the cost of four separate plans
I'd say it is very unlikely because otherwise is against the base principle of economy - when you buy more you get a better price. The similar reason stands against the floppynet transport - since one have to transport the data literally and thus costs a definite sum of money. I'm just pointing out what such kind of internet connection sharing is not very practical. But whatever, let's get back to tech:
MastarPete wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2020 4:10 am they were all in the same building
if they're spread across town
Not necessarily all of them simultaneously, but sooner or later friends will have to meet to merge the their partial downloads, so ad-hoc LAN will be established at some time. This LAN of peers, however, will be less efficient due lack of part rarity info at the time of download. Might have to reserve daily traffic quota to grab missing parts.