ABC: Opening partially downloaded season series

[Archwolf]

I'm downloading a complete tv season serie and it's at 15% (so the first few episodes are done). Is there a way so that I allready can open these files without having to wait till the complete download is done. I use BS player to open the file, and it says can't open file

Please help

[ziggyjuarez]

it does not download one at a time so most likely only 5or6 have like 15%done.But VLC player is good.

[Archwolf]

it does not download one at a time so most likely only 5or6 have like 15%done.But VLC player is good.

The first episodes are done there around 350 mb same as a single episode I downloaded

[OASVstar]

VIDEO LAN PLAYER

VLC it palys mostly anything..

Even bins and cues.

[borisn]

same problem

[cobrav2]

i'm pretty sure there isn't a way to preview torrents.

PLus that isn't the way torrents work, you don't get it as a file start to finish you get different parts from all over the place then you get the other parts from seeders and peers so you most probably don't have the first few episodes.

[browser]

I have the same problem as Archwolf. I can clearly see through file size that the download is downloading an episode at a time.

first 3 episode at 350MB, 4th at 130MB, rest at 0MB

therefore it should be possible to watch these finished downloads. I use VLC but it down't come up.

Any idea/other programs i need to view it?

[lynx]

Torrents are divided into pieces, not files, although the end result is the files you want. If you download a piece which happens to go at the end of one of the files, it has to allocate all the space before that piece in order to put the piece in the proper place. But the rest of the file may be empty.

An alternatively allocation strategy is to dump the data at the end of the file, then move everthing up when an earlier piece arrives. If your torrent client uses this strategy there is no way to view the file until is has completed, but at least you should know roughly when that happens because the file won't reach full size until just before it is finished.

I think ABC has the option to use either strategy but I'm not sure.

With ABC you can't always tell how much of a file has been downloaded, I've noticed that it is particularly true with 3.0.0, maybe it was fixed in 3.0.1b. Other clients are better at it than ABC. Also, ABC locks the file (instead of just doing write lock) which means you can't even copy the file. It says it releases this lock when the file is complete, but given the fact that it sometimes doesn't know that it has completed that's another linked problem.

If you really want to view what you've DLed, you will probably have to stop the torrent, make a copy of the file and restart the torrent (or view the file with the torrent stopped). VLC is probably the best viewer in this situation.

The above are some of the reasons why I don't use ABC any more.