ways to watch a torrent while it's downloading?

milkytoast@kbin.social to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 74 points –

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.

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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.

Also qbittorrent is open source, with no crap like bloat etc, that is usually found with other torrent clients

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.

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

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.

Yeah, I remember ages ago I set up a torrent to loop play either in VLC or Real player. It "worked" kinda, in that it would play what it had of the file. It didn't work, because as you said, it was grabbing a second at a time from random bits of the movie. Sometimes created funny sequences though.

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.

Be vary there is a lot of shady versions of PopcornTime.

Stremio with Torrentio plugin is a decent alternative.

I remember when PopcornTime was the thing!

It was everywhere on the news websites haha.

I was gonna mention this. Popcorntime certainly brought back many memories. I didn't even realize I was torrenting it, thought it was just a slow alternative to Crackle.

As others mentioned, Stremio + Torrentio is amazing. Just make sure you use, preferably, RealDebrid with it. If you can't use RD, you can use a VPN, but it will cost you some playback speed.

PopcornTime as others have mentioned is amazing, but sadly I haven't heard much about it lately. Honestly, Stremio + Torrentio is way better though in my opinion. It's easy to set up and has a ton of shows.

I know that in Tixati you can set the download priority to 'Sequential'. Then VLC should be able to play it while it's downloading.

popcorntime

Is that still alive/not malware?

https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop

With what API servers? The official ones were taken down.

I don't know but it still works. Used it just the other day to find a version I couldn't get via normal means. I'm guessing some sort of magnet search?

I used it a few weeks ago, people on r/PopCornTimeApp seem happy.

They share https://shows.cf/

I might have to check it out again. Haven't used it for years and figured it was officially dead. Thanks

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.

Deluge is another client that supports sequential downloads. It's my personal favourite because it's also built on a client-server model, so I can have thr client on all my devices connecting to a single server.

TorrServer is a program that allows users to view torrents online without the need for preliminary file downloading. The core functionality of TorrServer includes caching torrents and subsequent data transfer via the HTTP protocol.

https://github.com/YouROK/TorrServer

Android client

https://github.com/YouROK/TorrServe

It's able work completly in ram without need downloading whole files on disk.

Torrents are usually not downloaded in order but (for all intents and purposes) randomly. That means that, even though 10% might already be downloaded, it might just be the final 10% of the movie (or more realistically, random snippets scattered throughout the file).

There used to be some torrent clients that were able to do what you ask, request pieces in order only, but I don't know if they are still around and they could potentially affect your download speed.

It does affect download speed, but if you've already downloaded some of it and your download speed is faster than the video playback, it works quite well.

mpv extends play length while it's getting updated. Saw this while reencoding a video.

I just use Deluge and open the file with VLC and it works so long as the download stream keeps up with the actual video time (IE it doesn't slow down to where the video reaches the end of what it has finished downloading).

Back in the days I used MPlayer for that.most of the time you could just open the file in it and it was able to show you all the completed parts.

I think that wouldn't work as the toreent doesn't download in the right order, correct me if I'm wron though

You don't really get your file in any particular order when you torrent. So I'm pretty sure this isn't possible.