The Scene can release how they wish, but they don’t release .torrent files. Who uploads .torrent files in RAR format? Second-Hand people get the RAR files from The Scene, and make it a .torrent.

THOSE people should unpack first and then make a .torrent file. If it’s crap, torrent sites have comments too.

Sometimes a torrent claims to be “an image” but doesn’t say if it’s .ISO, .UIF, .NRG, .IMG…etc. If the unpacked image file were the source of the torrent, then we’d all know.

I think that rar’ing the release at this time serves a purpose. You can’t download parts of the release and skip things you don’t want.

becuase you have to download the entire release everyone seeds everything… downloading is faster for people who want the whole thing and not just that one song (or whatever)…

Regarding RAR itself. It has no purpose on any modern P2P network because all of them support resuming, swarming, checksuming and more. If the self-announced elite insists on using outdated technology like FTP, so be it but everyone with a brain should know better.

There are of course exceptions where archives like ZIP/RAR/TAR are suitable like software source files where you have large number of files which are rather useless on their own.

I think RAR etc. are also used because some early bittorrent implementations had issues with torrents that contained many files because they’d try to open each of these files even though there’s usually a limit of a few hundred (or even less) open files. Nowadays these just open the files they really need to access at any time.

I can agree that for example music albums sholdn’t be rar’d, but
* apps
* movies
* games
etc etc still should, since you can’t know how by what means it was transferred before/will be transferred after and how many times that’ll happen – not keeping the scene releases intact only makes for worse and worse quality (video artefacts and the like).

thx

if u upload a torrent DONT rar it.
use common sence ffs! who cares even if the file gets cut in half, 3gb vs 1.5gb, with a 56k modem i would care. its not 1990 anymore. and its not cool. many times files dont get that much smaller anyway.

RAR sucks

I tend to unpackage my downloads, then re-package them without RAR, as you suggest, leaving in the credits.

Any new torrents I upload, I DO NOT RAR ‘cos it’s crap, outdated and serves no useable purpose. It is simply self-gratification for numpties who like to make life difficult for themselves.

Now go and write “RAR is crap” 100 times then split it into multiple 50MB files if it’ll make you feel any better.

Z

Or a whole season of a show.

Want a particular episode first (or only)? With regular video files, I can tell my client to make certain files a high priority, others a low priority, and not download some files at all. I can’t do that with RAR.

My torrent client gives me percentage completion for each file I’m downloading. If a file reaches 100%, I can start watching it right away. I can’t do that with RAR.

My video player is quite good about dealing with “corrupted” files, including partially-downloaded torrents. Even if a file hasn’t reached 100%, I can usually start watching if it’s close, and it’ll skip over the incomplete parts. (So much for needing samples.)

And all this still ignores one of the big annoyances about RAR — having to uncompress them at the end. There’s many factors involved there: Extra time to decompress them. Double the space to hold both the RARs and the decompressed results. Risk that the file might be password protected (or fake altogether) and you’ve just downloaded gigs for nothing.

2. “One of the main reasons that releases are rar’d up with an sfv is to check integrity as well as make it convenient to get a replacement file if one is bad file from one site (or tracker for that matter).”

Read the article. “BitTorrent solves these problems for you”. And it does it better than RAR, too.

With BitTorrent, you check file chunks *as* you download, rather than just at the end. Plus, if a chunk is incorrect, it’s much smaller and easier to replace than an entire RAR part, and your client does so automatically.

3. “And a couple of important points you should remember.. First, your a leech.”

Even BitTorrent “leechers” are still helping everyone else download, by re-uploading file data to everyone else. They may not provide content themselves, but they do still help spread the existing content to those who want it. Releases wouldn’t be worth very much if nobody actually downloaded and used them.

4. “Without the scene and its DECADES of existence you wouldn’t be here with your web blog trying to influence people who do not know any better that YOUR way is right or better than years of experience and technical evolution.”

BitTorrent is the latest result of those “years of experience and technical evolution”. It solves almost all the problems RAR files once solved, but better.

The one unsolved problem is compression, but as stated, most large files are already compressed and don’t benefit from RAR.

Multi-volume RAR files were just a cheap, early imitator of what BitTorrent now provides, and are only useful when you *aren’t* using BitTorrent.

Just because we’ve done something one way for decades doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use a better way when it comes along.

5. “And lastly.. YOU GET 90% OF WHAT YOU DOWNLOAD FROM THE SCENE IN THE FIRST PLACE AND THEY DO NOT CARE WHAT YOU THINK.”

Actually, I get what I download from people who take Scene stuff and then release it as a torrent. *These* are the people who should be unRARing the data before creating their torrent.

If the Scene is going to continue doing things on a less-reliable medium like Usenet, then there’s no reason they shouldn’t use RAR or whatever they feel is best.

All we ask is that the data be unRARed *before* it hits the torrent trackers. That’s the way BitTorrent is meant to be used, and that’s the way it works best.

I agree, RAR sucks!!! It’s just for n00bs like the lamer who asks about a “step-by-step” guide. Poor boy.

Certainly a binary “unrar” program is available. Under a silly up-yer-bum license, and no source is made available. (How many security booboos lurk in there, that we haven’t yet heard of? Will the author update the binary-only program for “minor” platforms?)

This problem is felt more seriously by PowerPC users (i.e. GNU/Linux or FreeBSD on a Mac or some such), who cannot even resort to proprietary software as an interim solution. To a free software purist the situation is simply unacceptable.

For those who want to compress their ISO images and the like, I would suggest 7zip (compresses really, really well) or just plain old zip (compresses a bit less, but still takes the “air” out of your ISOs plenty fine).