ways to watch a torrent while it's downloading? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by milkytoast@kbin.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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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[-] 520@kbin.social 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

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.