let’s say I’m torrenting a movie, and the torrent is downloading faster than the movie would play, is there any software that can handle a constantly changing file? thanks

edit: basically as long as you tell your torrent client to download sequentially, VLC (and probably most other video players) can just play the file like normal. though as one user pointed out, this may affect dl speeds.

  • Sabin10@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    Qbittorrent let’s you set a torrent to download in sequential order and download first and last pieces first. This let’s me play files as they are downloading.

  • 520@kbin.social
    1·
    8 months ago

    You’re going to to still have problems, owing to the fact that torrent protocol doesn’t download files sequentially (edit: some clients do have this option but it can slow your downloads dramatically). It doesn’t download the first 5 seconds, then the 5 seconds after that, but rather 5 second bits at random parts of the movie.

  • Flim@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    100% doable and easy. In clients like qBittorrent you can right click on a torrent and select both “Download Sequentially” and “Download first and last pieces”. Once it downloads the first and last pieces, you can wait for a bit until maybe the first 5% has downloaded, and you can open the file with a decent video player like VLC, and as long as the download is faster than the play speed, it’ll play just fine.

    • milkytoast@kbin.socialOP
      1·
      8 months ago

      huh I didn’t know VOC could just handle it like that. but thinking about it now that makes sense. its not like its loading the whole file into memory, its just reading from the disk

  • ANIMATEK@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Nobody mentioned Popcorn Time? It is a bit torrent client with an integrated media player. It does exactly what you are asking + it has a great “poster wall” interface.

  • Chillbruh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but isn’t this the idea behind WebTorrent? You can play a movie while its downloading from a torrent.