Yeah *ALL* shows on torrents will be a problem.. as that's just too many shows. Most people if they cared to, would probably only seed for 10 files at once (which alone is a lot).

The system could/would work great for newer releases or the most popular videos.. but as for ALL of them, hard to say what to do.

It'd be nice to access the torrent links directly beside the "Realplayer" links on the main site. It's slightly difficult now to figure out which videos are which.. as I personally would rather help seed the files in higher demand.

Ok, Thanks v00d00

Niall, thanks again for your interest, there's been a lot of talk about torrents but not many people have engaged torrents at the tracker level.

Now, the 2.7 gigs transferred via torrent so far would cost pot.tv about $2.70, so we're not saving much yet, but the monthly pot.tv streaming costs are about $1800 (yes, 1.8 terabytes, or 1800 Gb), so there's a lot of potential to save money on bandwidth and spend it on new show production.

The issue raised about the file naming conventions is a good one. For historical reasons, there isn't a strict naming convention for shows that doesn't really correspond to the show series, title or pot-tv show number. On the media.pot.tv:6969 tracker, you'll see the files have their original filenames, which don't correspond to the show listing and don't tell much about what show it is or where it comes from. I can cross reference them no problem in the database, but that doesn't help as much with shows "in the wild", like on your computer or if they make their way to other trackers.

As far as linking the torrents into their pot-tv show pages, I've tried this with the media.pot.tv tracker. Unfortunately that's not much good if the shows aren't being seeded, and like I mentioned earlier, reliably seeding 3000 shows is tricky. I've tried using btlaunchmany, but so far without much success. There is also a new solution called "osprey" (with permaseed), but I haven't managed to get a working install of this yet. Ideally the torrents linked to the pot.tv show pages would show the seed/leech activity of each torrent. For this it would be best to have a tracker that stores this activity data in a mysql database, but the one we've set up uses some other data storage. We could scrape the tracker for this info, but it would be much nicer to have direct access to the data. So I'm interested to hear about experiences with other trackers that we can run on our linux boxes.

Karlis, I think if you and Niall got together you would easily solve the problems.. the two of you are way beyond my knowledge of torrents.

From my perspective, like you mentioned already.. the sooner a system of naming can be instituted the better. Show name+date released would be ideal. Infact, it may be ideal (though extremely tedious) to rename the old shows now rather than leave them as be.. it'll mix things up, but at least we can all start on a fresh clean and SAME page.

Also.. the 3000 video files is a dramatic number.. for myself, I would willing to help seed every new video that's released for about a month, or so I seed around 10 torrents at a time.

As for bandwidth savings, it would be minimal thus far, since really nobody knows about torrents and the system hasn't been refined. The thing before was that when I wanted to watch a video over again, I had to waste bandwidth getting it re-sent to me. If I already have the videos on my system then I won't need to waste your bandwidth to review them. Multiply that experience by hundreds and before long the savings on Pot-tv's end should be dramatic.

Perhaps the long lingering files would only remain in streamed format for those fishing through the archive, but if the first releases of new videos could be distributed throughout torrents, it would take an immediate cut off the bandwidth and stop future re-downloads from those who have the files themselves now.

Anyway, I'm rambling I think.. but this is definitely going great so far!

bandwidth diets suk...but this is definatly cool...

im going to seed till 420 ratio Im going to burn to disk and distribute for those who cannot get to the internet. Thanks for getting the shows out to the general public and keep up the trials for the torrents good luck

That's a great part of getting the full files too is that you can more easily share with others. Now I can view specific files on all computers, especially those with dialup or no internet.

torrents are working excellent! awsome speed.

Niall, Your a legend mate. and so a Pot-tv. They have alot of good stuff on there.

Bit torrents are a bit tricky for poeple like myself who are not computer savvy. But fairly easily to workout after playing around a bit.

Good on ya Niall.