Fortunately I have enough of the rar parts to extract the data I want but damn.

It's the file headers, right? Without those, they are unreadable. 🫠

Oof

It's never that .txt file that says where it was originally uploaded

I wonder how viable it would be to bruteforce it. Not a serious proposal but still fun to think about

It absolutely could be brute forced, we litrally have the hash of the chunk. I've thought about it before too, if one seeder is constantly giving, or refusing to even give, the chuck because of the hash mismatch, odds are it's only a bit flipped somewhere.

Another option that I've done before is find the file elsewhere, and switch it out. Seed for a long time then, you weren't the only person at 99.9%.

I'm missing the NFO file, 250KB of one of the rar parts and 300KB of a video sample.

250KB of one of the rar parts

Ouch!

This is how I found the torrent for “God of Cookery (1996)” ending and can totally relate. If you see Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, this one is worth seeing.

I had one at 62% for years I watched peers come and go but never lost hope. Today it's at 99%. All I'm missing are some padding files so basically 100%.

There's me and one other peer who seems to be willing to seed until the end of time. My ratio keeps climbing so I assume someone somewhere is thankful

3 months waiting for 4mb left, I contemplated trying to brute force that last bit

The problem is there will be multiple solutions that result in the same hash (collisions), but only one of them will be correct

And it would take an extremely long time to find them all, I don't even think a modern GPU could do it in a lifetime

How and why does this happen? I have more torrents stuck at 99.9% than anywhere else combined.

SHA1 has a fairly even distribution, it produces 160 bit digests, so each possible variation of a chunk will have a roughly 2^-160^ probability to hit your hash. Now assuming you have some insane computing device that can do an exahash per hour (that's 10^18^ hashes, a lot more than any modern hardware can do), finding one would take around 1.7E+26 years. Now the funniest part. Assuming your chunk is 32KiB large (practically nobody uses such small chunks today, so it's the best-case scenario), there are 2^(32×2^10^×2^3^)/2^160^ possible variations of the chunk that would produce your exact hash. That's roughly 1.1E+78865 fitting chunks with only one being correct. And it takes you 1.7E+26 years to get to just one of them.

absolutely could be brute forced

Yea, I wouldn't say that.

This should be the next cryptocurrency proof of work algorithm

sigh the pain of trying to get obscure nbc sitcom boston common for five months now

Bitcoin uses two rounds of SHA256 if I recall correctly.

I'm still waiting on early 2000s flac files of GOB.

My theory is that either its from people deleting associated files like .srt and .txt or companies intentionally sabotaging torrents so that it looks like they're being seeded still but not fully.

In any case, the times this has happened to me I'll try to play the file and most times it works still.

It looks like bittorent version 2 hashes with sha-256 at a 16kb resolution.

pieces root

For non-empty files this is the the root hash of a merkle tree with a branching factor of 2, constructed from 16KiB blocks of the file. The last block may be shorter than 16KiB. The remaining leaf hashes beyond the end of the file required to construct upper layers of the merkle tree are set to zero. As of meta version 2 SHA2-256 is used as digest function for the merkle tree. The hash is stored in its binary form, not as human-readable string.

Seems like that should be easily parallelizable and can fit into thread memory on a modern GPU.

It would just depend on how many 16kb blocks are remaining in that 0.1%

Well the hashes are always much smaller than the actual data, otherwise downloading the hashes would take just as long as downloading the data lol.

So 16KB blocks means 131072 bits per block, subtract the 256 bit hash size and that means 2^130816 hash collisions

That's a lot lol, you'll never find which one is the correct one. Even if you instantly had a list of all values that match the desired hash, you'd have to check them all and somehow determine which one was correct.

Trying to get an audio copy of the Witcher prequels here

All the mainline books were easy, but these last couple have been a pain.

And don't forget, when it finishes to seed that SOB for a long long time

The seas are treacherous to go about alone

Stupid protocol can't send the big file if the small file next to it is missing. Gotta have the whole block.

try soulseek for those

If it were 1 bit, that would be easy. But 4 million bytes? Oof.

Most of the time it is due to Cross-seeding and additional or manipulated files.

I.e. the 99% torrent contains an additional file like an nfo or srt that was not in the original upload on a different site.
People cross-seeding the original torrent don’t have that file, so you can only get 99% from them. And if the uploader of the torrent with the additional file stops seeding, there’s no one you can get it from.

Or if it is stuck at 99% without additional files, it’s possible that the file that was uploaded was manipulated. Stripped UID or other metadata that was changed. So there will be a mismatching piece that you can’t get from the cross-seeders. And again, if the uploader stops seeding the manipulated file, you can only get 99% from the cross-seeders.

I’ve replied this to another comment already, but it is probably this:

Most of the time it is due to Cross-seeding and additional or manipulated files.

I.e. the 99% torrent contains an additional file like an nfo or srt that was not in the original upload on a different site.
People cross-seeding the original torrent don’t have that file, so you can only get 99% from them. And if the uploader of the torrent with the additional file stops seeding, there’s no one you can get it from.

Or if it is stuck at 99% without additional files, it’s possible that the file that was uploaded was manipulated. Stripped UID or other metadata that was changed. So there will be a mismatching piece that you can’t get from the cross-seeders. And again, if the uploader stops seeding the manipulated file, you can only get 99% from the cross-seeders.

I'm probably one of the people causing this issue to others. I always uncheck info, text, subtitle and other minor files that are not needed for the video/game, and so while me and presumably others are seeding the game files, rarely anyone seeds the info files, which end up being that 0.01%

This is why recovery info for archives is a boon - sadly it's pretty out of fashion.

Sigh, the last 3 seasons of Becker for me....

A man of exquisite taste, bravo.

it took me forever to grab star-crossed season 1 since it's very niche and cw cancelled it like before it ended because it only had 1 seeder and everyone was trying to get it; now it has two potential seeders and i've been seeding for like a year just so nobody else goes through the pain.

I've found torrents for seasons 1 and 2 of Boston Common on a private tracker

Why do this? Somebody might need those files, and they only cost you a couple kb of space

Often rars in torrents have a bit of redundancy so the source files can be recovered even if the rar isn't complete

It's not about the size, but amount of files in downloads folder, which makes indexing slower.

That and idfk what .ini is, and "Ini" don't need that shit on my pc anyway. Srt and mp4 pls, thx.

Personally I think that contributing to the swarm is worth the tiny impact to indexing. You never know who may need those files (especially subtitles, which I use all the time). But to each their own

I use MPC-HC player. Once you press a D button, you can load any subtitle you want straight from subtitle databases. No need for seperate downloads.

Are they retimed to match the video? A lot of times there can be different timings based on what branding the video has, like the short Netflix logo animation at the beginning of every Netflix video.

I can highly recommend usenet instead.

The first result usually fits. It looks by keywords like blu-ray and release group

Usenet has a capitalist corporation vibe. Torrenting is about community, sharing and giving back. I feel a lot better when I torrent, like I'm a part of something.

Whatttt xD

If no one shares with usenet, there's nothing there to download.

I'm part of several closed usenet communities and torrent communities. The usenet ones feel much more like real communities than the torrent ones. The quality and support is also much better.

I've had to manually retime subtitles often enough that I'm glad some torrents come with them. It's especially the case for modern shows where the video can get ripped from many different sources (netflix, hulu, etc), each with their own quirks and timings.

My bad I guess. Do people on usenet actually create original releases though? I had the impression that private torrent trackers create the vast majority of original high quality releases.

With usesnet are you not downloading from a central server? How can you share things? I'll admit I don't know a lot about usenet.

Every other peer: The same 99.9.

Yeah it's all on servers. It's a different layer of the internet. You can share by uploading to usenet servers. To get large retention you should pay for a decent server, but with that you also pay for privacy. I pay €7,50 per month. But there are also free servers. Stuff gets uploaded, also many usenet original posts, and indexers can find it so you can download it. The downside is that you need to pay to be able to download old stuff, the upside is that you're not dependant on seeders like with torrents. But the amount I can find is vast. Much more than torrents. I can find series from the 1960 from my country. I can find litteraly everything. There has not been a single thing I couldn't find with usenet but we're able to find with torrents. There have been so many occasions where I couldn't find a torrent, or it wasn't seeded, or it failed at 99%. Usenet is properly maintained by a vast community.

That's interesting. Surely you can't compete with the library that's on OPS or RED.
I also watch movies and I don't usually download particularly niche things and I've never been stuck at 99% or was unable to fine a movie.

I guess with Usenet you can get access to a good content library immediately but with torrents you need to work your way up. Also 7,50 a month is way too high lol.

Whether you pay 7,50 on usenet or a VPN. I mean, you could do without a VPN, but in Germany you get hefty fines for downloading with torrents and when you're a decent uploader any government can use you as an example or you get fines from companies like Disney, Paramount or a copyright violation hunter company like the Dutch Brein. One movie in Germany can set you back 1200 euros. In the US there are kids who were taken by SWAT, fined thousands of dollars and got banned from using electronics for years by a judge. Next to that torrents aren't safe. There is a lot of malware, several download clients are known to use your machine in the background to mine crypto, there's an open connection to your machine which could be used by hackers as torrent connections aren't very safe.

I personally don't think 7,50 a month for privacy and safety is too much. It's less than half of a Netflix subscription while you can download litteraly anything.

But there are also free usenet servers, the retention (days uploads stay on the server) is just much lower. Like 50 days compared to 5000+ days for a paid server. It works fine for downloading new series episodes and movies for example.

Surely you can't compete with the library that's on OPS or RED

I'm not familiar with those, but there are many communities uploading loads of rare stuff. I don't think you can exceed usenet libraries. Usenet is also much older than torrents, it's from the early days of the internet. The infrastructure is vast.