WCA Downloads Reach Milestone Figures (August 25, 2004)

Cpl Hades

Cpl Hades

Mr. Kat
It has been just over five months since our new higher resolution WCA episodes were released. Killer, who has been kindly hosting the episodes for us, reports that in that time the first episode alone has clocked up 2TB (2,000GB) of traffic and nearly 10,000 downloads. The traffic from all of the episodes combined is 5TB. This suggests that people have been downloading the first episode, but forgetting to grab the rest, so here are all of the links again.
To download, click the link above for the episode you want, then on the page that follows, right click where it says "Hier" (Klicke Hier) and select Save Target As, or the equivalent option for your browser. There are also three ways in which to watch the episodes - airdate order, timeline order and production order. You can choose your favorite with the help of our handy guide!

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Original update published on August 25, 2004
 
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When I downloaded the first episode and tried to play it each time it would freeze my computer...I stopped downloading them after that. What codec are these videos using?
 
Hiya.

I understand the difficulties in finding someplace to host such a huge amount of data, but is there way to pass a more direct link to download facility? FTP was great for the Document Archives and Donkey Kong in Concert, but of course, this isn't possible here. The HTTP alternative I use to handle download resuming can't seem to handle the funny links the host uses, and I don't want to try things like GetRight or Download Accelerator unless I know that it'll work without hassles.

Can anyone help? Thanks.
 
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The guy gets some revenue from the ads that are served, which is only fair considering how much 5TB of traffic would cost. If you want to know if Getright will work, it's probably best to ask him directly.
 
I suppose it's also nice to know that those DivX files work great on my Archos AV400 media player. I can now watch WCA on the bus, on my TV, and anywhere else I carry it.

(The old versions had audio that lagged. This one is perfect).
 
FreshDownload works for me on the WCA Episodes. It usually gets the file-names completely wrong however due to the strange link. But that really isn't a problem, is it.
 
Thanks for the tip, cff. Interesting download procedure (for downloading the actual program). Once I got it started, it had a habit of stopping all the time just because it couldn't start the fourth connection, so I restarted the download with three connections. It seems to be working all right for the moment. Now I'll just have to see how the video turns out. After seeing the Making of WC3 video, I reckon some things do justify the obscene (on dial-up) download times. :)
 
Wedge009 said:
Hiya.

I understand the difficulties in finding someplace to host such a huge amount of data, but is there way to pass a more direct link to download facility? FTP was great for the Document Archives and Donkey Kong in Concert, but of course, this isn't possible here. The HTTP alternative I use to handle download resuming can't seem to handle the funny links the host uses, and I don't want to try things like GetRight or Download Accelerator unless I know that it'll work without hassles.
Click to expand...

At some point we will be transitioning the WCA to our FTP. We have quite a considerable amount of bandwidth now, but we're still recovering fromour last server move and things. There is also the potential for up to three very large fan projects releasing in the next few months, potentially serving hundreds of gigabytes quite easily. We plan to be ready to host those, so we might wait and see what they use up first.
 
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Alright, how much is this all costing in hosting bills? Given the bandwidth estimations for all these things, and current rates for bandwidth, it must be a pretty penny...
 
I always have m DL managers configured to use only ONE connection at a time for each file. That way you can use them even with sites that don't allow DL managers. Also usually doesn't really cost any bandwidth compared to multiple connections.
 
The single connection is probably a good idea - I had about 28% of the first episode downloaded after one session. I tried it again today and one of the connections failed, leaving me with "Resume NOT supported" message. When I tried it again, it sent me back to 0%. That's really disappointing. :(

I use FileZilla for FTP and I didn't have many problems at all when downloading a lot of the new fun stuff from the CIC's birthday (as well as a lot of big files I never tried downloading before).

[Argh, it buggered up again. :( If the single connection doesn't work, I think I'd better wait until an FTP option is available.]
 
I find download managers personally annoying. I've seen people use them on tiny files that really would probably be faster if they left it at one connection.

I was, for a time, pondering writing an anti-download manager CGI script that would simply generate corrupt downloads, as well as slowing down the download the more connections are created (open two connections - twice as long as normal, etc). Of course, since most of my downloads were text, I'd simply generate loads of data to the style of "Please read the rules before downloading".
 
As I said - I use FD purely for its capability to RESUME downloads, not for speed gain. And your script wouldn't hurt me all that much - FD can forge its ID and mask itself as IE for example :-P
 
Setting your download manager to use multiple connections is probably the rudest thing you can do towards other users. Each connection uses up CPU time and memory on the other end. Ten people using 5 connections is the same as 50 people downloading. A few years ago we lost our WCA mirror because of this.
 
I've been watching WCA on the big screen TV and it really rocks. I like it much better now then I did the first time I saw it.

It's really good, not just because it's WC.
 
Worf said:
Alright, how much is this all costing in hosting bills? Given the bandwidth estimations for all these things, and current rates for bandwidth, it must be a pretty penny...
Click to expand...

Bandwidth probably costs us just under $2000 a year. Other people like mthsicarius and blacklance.org are separate. We also pay for several domains, licenses, promotional items and giveaways too. Some of us spend $2000 individually on DragonCon each year too.
 
cff said:
As I said - I use FD purely for its capability to RESUME downloads, not for speed gain. And your script wouldn't hurt me all that much - FD can forge its ID and mask itself as IE for example :-P
Click to expand...

Oh no. I do something much simpler. IP-tracking. My stuff isn't so popular that people behind NATs will get it much (if so, you just add tags to your download - a URL is a URL, and require referrer headers and/or cookies). Of course, that can be bypassed easily enough (proxies), but if someone is going to go through all the trouble to download a file 0.001 seconds faster, well, more power to him.

Right now, my method is to look at the logs, and if I see rule-breaking accesses, I just rename the directory to return a bunch of 404's temporarily. Most people are pretty good now that I posted a big fat warning about this.

The goal is to get a good enough system, use it until it breaks, then go to another system. ("Good Enough" is defined as how much effort is it worth to protect - a 32k file, for example is what I've seen people open 3 connections for (probably 4, but there was no segment that could be smaller).

And if there was a download that was large, I tend to use wget these days.
 
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