BasharOfTheAges wrote:For BT to work, many users would need to be seeding many videos. Bandwidth issues asside, do you have any idea the system resources that would be required to keep up with tracking 70,000 + videos?
I could tell you about some impressive trackers, but I'm not.
I'm simply saying that if this site wanted to; Given the money, bandwidth, and (I'm guessing) hardware here to act as a general seed on top of willing members that it can be done. Or at least massively cut the bandwidth requirments.
When you work with small filesize / large numbers of downloads, a BT system simply does not work because the memory requirements needed to simply keep track of seeding information for that many files is enourmous.
And just how much memory do you think it takes to track lets say 250,000 torrents? Do you know?
Now take into account the average ratio of someone that gains nothing by closing the BT window after his/her download is done and you have far less than 1% of the videos being seeded at any one time.
Setting up and properly maintaining such a tracking system would cost more (in terms of man-hours and hardware upgrades) than it would ever save.
Well given the hundreds of gigs transfered here I bet their is more than enough hardware to convert a large section of the database over to BT. The question of manhours is a valid point. A tailor fit job would take some time, however I'm sure that other mass torrent sites would be willing to sell their setup for a few hundred bucks.
Now the issue about people killing their BT right after they finish the download: How is it better to have those people not sharing any data at all?
Phade, you graph is a bit hard to read however it seems to show that most videos are downloaded between 25 to 150 times a mounth, and a small section are downloaded many thousands of times. A tracker for 25,000 torrents is a very light load on most systems. I'd suggest to take a gander at some other mass torrent sites. I'm sure most of the operators would be willing to chat over some of the issues you have with your set up.
I won't say, OMG believe me I'm some random guy off the internet that thinks he knows how to run this site better! I won't try and tote my own knowlage or skills. I'm saying that before you reject the idea (and this goes for anyone reading this) go do some honest research on the technology and requirements. I think that you will be very impressed at how flexable BT can be.
Hell I remember some talk about making picture BT plugins to help out image archive sites, and if anything that's even more "everything randomly gets downloaded" than our AMVs.