bittorrent
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There is no HD via BitTorrent
I know what you are thinking, BitTorrent will carry any bits you want. That is not what I am talking about, I am talking about all the people who responded to my "How to: get tons of HD content playing on your PC" with the suggestion to use BitTorrent! This has annoyed me ever since and I am here to set the record straight. This is going to be old news to most of you, but for those who don't know here we go.As we have discussed recently HD material is arguably at least 1280x720, but preferably 1920x1080p ( I threw that P in there to fend off any 720p vs 1080i debates). Anything less just isn't HD, especially if it's 480 and under like DVDs. There are sites on the Internet that hosts torrent files with video that have HDTV in the title and I think this causes some confusion. This simply means that the SOURCE video was HDTV, this of course was before the video was re-compressed. The people that post these files are very skilled in regards to video compression and although the files look better than anything you are watching on SD cable they are still NOT HD. The few I have sampled are 624x352 which is not even DVD quality much less HD quality. 1920x1080p is 2.1 mega pixels these files are 0.2 mega pixels, that is 10 times smaller! The original HD file was ~6GB and the file downloaded was 350MB. Granted they look much better than anything anyone who doesn't have HD has ever seen, but to call them HD or even discuss them during a HD content article would be crazy. For all of the people surprised by this, go out and find yourself some real HD material and maybe you will finally understand what all the HD fuss is about.
ipodnova.com lists iPod torrent sites
Care to take bets on how long ipodnova.com will stay up? This site lists various torrent repositories that have sprung up that are dedicated to letting you download videos for that new iPod you got for Christmas. While TUAW does not condone such behaviour we feel that it is our bloggerly duty to point out the existence of this site.
mariposaHD: The Internet's first high definition TV show?
I must applaud the gentlemen at mariposaHD. These innovators no, pioneers, nay, heroes are (I think) the first people to produce a show in high definition for distribution over the Internet. It must be a rough life videotaping young women frolicking in South America, and I for one salute them in their efforts to spread the joy of 1080i everywhere. If you support these young men in their endeavors please donate the two gigabytes of hard drive space necessary, download and seed the torrent. I recommend uTorrent (via DownloadSquad) as an excellent BitTorrent client.The videos are made available free of charge, as WMVHD files in either 1080i, 720p or iPod video format. Sounds perfect for streaming to the Xbox 360, if you have Windows Media Center of course. Where did I put my list of reasons to envy Kevin cuz I need to add one more. I suspect that this show will require much more in depth coverge and hours and hours of long research, but if the guys at mariposaHD can make it, then it is my purpose and duty to view it (many times).Read [Via digg]
TUAW reader mailbag: 10.4.2 BitTorrent speed boost
TUAW reader KissTheRing writes:Ever since I got the 10.4.2 my bittorrent downloads have had much better performance, up and down. I've always gotten better torrent download speeds from my windows machine but not anymore. Could Apple be trying to fix the inability of iTunes to download podcasts that are distributed via torrents?Well, we can hope. How fast third party programs can perform uploads and downloads doesn't really tell us much about what Apple is planning, though. 10.2.4 included a number of networking fixes, and several of them could affect BitTorrent performance depending on your connection. In particular, the HTTP and HTTPS enhancements may have benefited the BitTorrent Tracker. These upgrades benefit all applications using these protocols, however, not just BitTorrent. In fact, they were patched to improve iDisk performance.Has anyone else noticed a significant BitTorrent boost with 10.4.2?
