Torrent Remixing

[thatguy]

Consider the following scenario

• A TV show now in the public domain is difficult to find.
• Members of a group share episodes as they are found.
• Over time an entire season is found.
• A torrent is made for that season

At this time there are many members of the group who have partial copies of the season, and many members seeding partial copies of the season.  Members with partial copies may not easily switch to the aggregated torrent, because they must move existing files into the correct folder with the correct name.  Instead the client should be able to re-map an existing file to a new torrent.

 

In order to reduce entropy clients and trackers should be able to combine such obviously related files into a single meta-info.  The tracker should be able to rendezvous members of both the fragmented torrents and the aggregate torrent.  To do this two things need to happen.

 

1. The metainfo file must have the optional md5 field supplied
2. The torrent protocol must support requests by md5 e.g. $_GET["wantMD5"]

 

Then clients would be able to create collections of data from various sources, and trackers could more efficiently provide seeds.

[Harold Feit]

Duplicate request.