Download Episode One! (March 10, 2004)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Download Episode One!

... not The Phantom Menace, the good episode one - Wing Commander Academy: Red & Blue. Thanks to the kind efforts of The Killer you can download the new, high-resolution version of WCA Episode One here (209 MB). Red & Blue was first broadcast on Saturday September 21st -- and it's been waiting patiently on my VHS tape for eight years! Enjoy! We'll measure download stats for this episode as a way of preparing to post the others! For those without the ability to download such a large file... here's some pictures:





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Original update published on March 10, 2004
 
Last edited by a moderator:
What about making it into a Bit Torrent? It would make downloading easier to all, including those with smaller bandwidths. I can learn HOW to do it, if necessary. What do you people think?
 
We've looked into bittorrents, and unfortunately they don't seem to match the kind of download requests we get for WCA. We do a steady low-key amount of WCA episodes rather than individual huge amounts at a time... and it would be nigh impossible to keep bittorrents running constantly.

As you can see from this update, though, we're working on getting the episodes out.
 
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/guide.html is how .torrent files are made. As you can see it would not make downloading easier at all. When you click on a .torrent file, only that torrent file is on the webserver. The actual file only resides on the computers of the downloaders themselves. So people would have a choice between downloading from mikemth.de or downloading from your bittorrent network. One or the other. I don't think anyone would prefer option two, given that people would first have to download from the webserver anyway, and then seed the file on bittorrent for others to download with no personal gain. I also don't see how bittorrent is better for those with low bandwidth. Just use a download manager.
 
Thanks for the episode! :)

I was wondering if it would be at all possible to get a small sample of the source video that the episode was encoded from? I have a feeling that I may be able to help bump up the quality and still keep the same file size. To find out for sure I'd need a little sample to do some testing with.
 
The raw files are huge (we're talking gigabytes per episode).. LOAF will know exactly how big. Any further increase in quality would be difficult.. remember, these are taken from VHS tapes recorded in 1996. You're not going to get much better unless the series is shown again and LOAF can TiVo it.
 
Heyo,
I'm still planning to try your idea for improving the quality - but I'm in the middle of another project and haven't dug out my sources yet. I'll give it a shot this weekend.
 
Any other servers to download? This one only lets me play the thing in internet explorer or media player? It won't let me save it anywhere. I also cannot use my download manager which makes it hard for me on 56k if the download stops half way though.
:(
 
Sarcasm: Yes, after a month of trying to find servers we secretly have lots of them that we're hiding.

Non-Sarcasm: Left click 'save as' or change your settings to download avis instead of playing them. What download manager are you using? A lot of them get banned by web servers since they're stupid and do things like initiate twenty downloads at once to get a file "faster".
 
We've looked into bittorrents, and unfortunately they don't seem to match the kind of download requests we get for WCA. We do a steady low-key amount of WCA episodes rather than individual huge amounts at a time... and it would be nigh impossible to keep bittorrents running constantly.

As you can see from this update, though, we're working on getting the episodes out.
Click to expand...

Humm... You're right, it'd be hard to keep them alive. So, yeah, better keep the downloads as they are.

Kris, even though your points make sense, BT is a very good way to download big files in general (not in this case, though). I leave my PC on all the time donwloading huge 1 or 2 GB files, something I'd never do without BT. I get 26 KBPS in a 256Kb connection. not bad at all. And the files a sure to work.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Sarcasm: Yes, after a month of trying to find servers we secretly have lots of them that we're hiding.

Non-Sarcasm: Left click 'save as' or change your settings to download avis instead of playing them. What download manager are you using? A lot of them get banned by web servers since they're stupid and do things like initiate twenty downloads at once to get a file "faster".
Click to expand...

Download Accelerator Plus doesn't work.
 
Thank god I'm not paying the bandwidth bill. 2.6GB of download for all the them. Whew!

(Also thank god that my internet doesn't have transfer caps...)

Anyhow, after getting fed up with Mozilla's purging of the cache, I find that elinks works great (text-mode browser) for downloading. I wonder how many downloads I can have going at once...
 
Fresh Download doesn't work properly either (well it works, but it cannot resume)
 
Hrm. 2.6GB for all of them, and I noticed that the episodes were downloaded 100+ times. 260 GB transfer, yow!

BTW, I noticed that the titles of episodes 8 and 9 were switched - it was listed on the front page as 8 - Recreation and 9 - Walking Wounded, while if you actually downloaded it, the filenames came out as 8 - Walking Wounded and 9 - Recreation. Who's correct?
 
EDIT:There was also a mixup with Episodes 8 and 9, though this one is a lot easier to fix. The file you downloaded called HQ_Episode_08_-_Walking_Wounded.avi should be called HQ_Episode_08_-_Recreation.avi and the episode you downloaded called HQ_Episode_09_-_Recreation.avi should be called HQ_Episode_09_-_Walking_Wounded.avi. We're going to be changing the download links as soon as possible, but if you've already got the episodes, then that should clear you up.
 
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