http://www.archive.org/download/TASVideos_Nes/dragonwarrior4-tas-adelikat.avi
Now the reason I include that link is to show an example of why I had to jump through hoops to finally get videos like that downloaded! There are numerous times, both on IE and Firefox, where it downloads into 30, 40, even 50 percent - and always lags long enough to get timed out; which pisses me off.
I went to www.flashget.com and downloaded their free accelerator program where I had a faster download, a strong grip, and the ability to resume from a stop or a failure. It's freeware last time I checked.
I don't know how Linux users can see this, but I find FlashGet useful for hard-to-download stuff these days. I prefer using this, even on a DSL connection because I am sure archive.org can have a lot of traffic - which I am sure that is already one reason. =/
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I personally download files from archive.org with nget.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I went to www.flashget.com and downloaded their free accelerator program where I had a faster download
I hope you understand how such "download accelerators" work (and why most of them are banned from many websites). Basically you are hogging the server's bandwidth at the expense of other people downloading from that server.
Most high-traffic servers allocate their outbound bandwidth equally to all clients (as that's usually the default behavior for server software). "Accelerators" work by fooling the server into thinking that you are actually a dozen or so clients, by downloading the file many times, starting from different sections of the file being downloaded (or if you are downloading multiple files, downloading them in parallel).
Thus if a server has, let's say 10 clients at the moment, and one of them is using a download accelerator which requests the file in, let's say 10 chunks, in parallel, the server now sees 20 clients. All the other 9 clients get 1/20th of the bandwidth, while the accelerator client gets 9/20th (ie. almost half) of the bandwidth. In other words, the accelerator is leeching the server at the expense of the other people, who are now getting a significantly slower download.
It's no wonder that many servers ban download accelerators altogether.
That I already know. Don't get me wrong, I only use download accelerators as a last resort. All I need is a reason, for getting over the fact that nearly every download I run gets stuck in the middle of nowhere and gets timed out. It's not you guys that have the answer, it's the server/network administrators.
I also learned that most download accelerators allow the user to select a number of simultaneous connections to the same server, so I always choose 1 to stay legal. And should the download stop in the middle of nowhere, it picks itself back up without starting over - unlike the way Firefox and IE does.
And should the download stop in the middle of nowhere, it picks itself back up without starting over - unlike the way Firefox and IE does.
I have actually always wondered why browsers don't support continuing interrupted downloads, even though it's a completely trivial thing to do, and basically every program which downloads things does that. Web browsers seem to be the only programs which don't. I can't understand why. What would be the problem? For example Firefox, based on Mozilla, based on Netscape, based on some older Mozilla or whatever, has been in development for something like 15 years, and it still has no support.
(Well, that's actually not completely true. Firefox actually has partial support for continuing an interrupted download. For example, at least in the Linux version, if you shut down while Firefox is downloading a large file, the next time you restart it, it will continue the download from where it was interrupted. I don't understand, however, why it cannot do that if it's the internet connection that gets interrupted.)
