Post by JosJuice

Posted: 1/4/2022 4:52 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3573)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee

Let's play a word association game, say the first word that comes to your mind when I say: "torrent". Now that you have that word, think if it is something you want this site to be associated with. I sure don't. Now let's talk about the technical/user burden of torrents. We have to set up a tracker and maintain it. We have lots of code for the site to manage and display torrents. And then we have to store all the torrents which are approaching 1 gig these days. And publishers have to create them, and maintain them. And users should be seeding them. SO now let's talk about the value they add. You can get a high quality encode. Well, the YouTube encode quality is INSANE compared to any other YouTube video I've ever seen. And if you don't like that, and even higher quality one is available as a direct download from archive.org. So maybe you are getting the benefit of faster downloads? Except you haven't been, 99% of all seeding is done from archive.org anyway where you were 1 click away from getting it. Maybe the ability to resume a download if you have an unreliable connection? Browsers have that built in now. The effort vs value isn't there and I don't want this site associated with what torrents have become synonymous with. We have discussed this before: https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/22931 but this is a different discussion. I'm removing them, unless a compelling reason is given otherwise. I'll give this discussion a week at most. Please discuss :)

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 1/4/2022 5:12 PM

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FitterSpace

Active player (466)

Joined: 3/30/2012
Posts: 405

I agree with the decision to remove them. Based on this thread that feos posted recently, basically everybody watched published TASes on YouTube anyway. Anybody that doesn't can still download them on archive.org. TASVideos providing torrents for videos is an old relic of a time when hosting videos wasn't something everybody could do. It's a lot of work to maintain an old feature nobody uses anymore.

Finished projects: 007: Nightfire 007: Nightfire "All Tokens" Goldeneye: 007 (Wii) Feng Shen Bang (Famicom)

Posted: 1/4/2022 5:18 PM
(Edited: 1/4/2022 5:19 PM)

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ThunderAxe31

Any

Editor, Reviewer, Skilled player (1358)

Joined: 9/12/2016
Posts: 1646
Location: Italy

To give more context, here is the true original reason why torrent downloads where introduced on this site: https://web.archive.org/web/20070207054226/http://tasvideos.org/WhyBitTorrent.html

Bisqwit wrote:

The ADSL connection at my server allows for about 56 kB/s of upload speed [1]. Some of it must be reserved for the web server, so let's say 30 kB/s can be allocated for the AVI file transfers.

And here is a practical example of bad advertising for the site (look at paragraph "8. TASVideos "): https://www.fossguru.com/best-torrent-sites-that-are-legal/

my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"

Posted: 1/4/2022 5:27 PM

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FitterSpace

Active player (466)

Joined: 3/30/2012
Posts: 405

ThunderAxe31 wrote:

And here is a practical example of bad advertising for the site (look at paragraph "8. TASVideos "): https://www.fossguru.com/best-torrent-sites-that-are-legal/

Wow. It's hard to believe that article was written only a few months ago. It's easy to think the person that wrote it is just an idiot, but they can't be the only one that thinks TASVideos distributes games.

Finished projects: 007: Nightfire 007: Nightfire "All Tokens" Goldeneye: 007 (Wii) Feng Shen Bang (Famicom)

Posted: 1/4/2022 5:29 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3573)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee

Wow, yeah, that is really bad. It just straight up claims you can get free games on this site. This is very much why we need to de-associate with torrents. Before streaming sites, it was a technology that solved a site problem, now it just associates us with things we do not want to be associated with.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 1/4/2022 5:37 PM

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EZGames69

He/They

Publisher, Reviewer, Expert player (4461)

Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2762

How the heck did they get literally every fact about us wrong?

[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing

Posted: 1/4/2022 6:09 PM

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Dacicus

Editor, Player (69)

Joined: 6/22/2005
Posts: 1050

ThunderAxe31 wrote:

And here is a practical example of bad advertising for the site (look at paragraph "8. TASVideos "): https://www.fossguru.com/best-torrent-sites-that-are-legal/

Wow, that's bad. What search process did you use to find that article? It's got a number of errors, and not just about our site.

Current Projects: TAS: Wizards & Warriors III.

Posted: 1/4/2022 6:13 PM

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ThunderAxe31

Any

Editor, Reviewer, Skilled player (1358)

Joined: 9/12/2016
Posts: 1646
Location: Italy

Dacicus wrote:

Wow, that's bad. What search process did you use to find that article? It's got a number of errors, and not just about our site.

I searched on Google: tasvideos torrent It wasn't on the first result though.

my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"

Posted: 1/4/2022 11:47 PM

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MUGG

Editor, Expert player (2330)

Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3933
Location: Germany

I used torrents as the only means to watch TASes back in 2006. I haven't used them at all in the last ten years, so I won't be missing them.

Youtube • Livestream • Progress 11th TASer of the Decade 2010-2019 !

Posted: 1/5/2022 8:17 AM
(Edited: 1/5/2022 8:18 AM)

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CoolKirby

Editor, Experienced player (570)

Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4036

I mostly only used torrents years ago on my slow DSL connection, for N64 encodes so I didn't have to deal with Mupen. Nowadays I have no reason not to watch in emulator or on YouTube. I cringe when I see the torrent link on every movie because of what they're normally associated with. I won't miss them.

Posted: 1/5/2022 12:10 PM

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xxezrabxxx

He/Him

Joined: 7/15/2017
Posts: 199
Location: Kentucky

Nobody uses them anymore at all. Only thing people use for torrents is for pirating music, TV, anime, etc. Pretty much everybody has a broadband internet connection that can display youtube just fine. And you can use the direct download link anyway on archive.org, I’ve done that for mobile viewing when I wanted to save data. Torrents are essentially useless and should be taken off the sitr.

I like to comment on submissions and look around the site. You have probably seen me before (if you have been around for a while) either on the site, Discord, or any other social media. I recently took up making temporary encodes for new submissions. Also, I never forget to greet Tompa wherever I find him! "when resyncing stuff sucks it's called Resuccing" - EZGames69 “If an emulator stops being accepted to the site it should be called an emuLAMEr” - EZGames69 "oh no discord, everything I say will now be logged forever, sdfsdf, time to hide" - Masterjun "just had to give therapy to a taxi with daddy issues" - psx Current Projects: Mother 3 (75% complete)

Posted: 1/5/2022 12:15 PM

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KennyMan666

He/Him

Joined: 8/24/2005
Posts: 375
Location: Göteboj

adelikat wrote:

Let's play a word association game, say the first word that comes to your mind when I say: "torrent". Now that you have that word, think if it is something you want this site to be associated with. I sure don't.

I don't disagree and also don't think the torrents are needed for movie downloads anymore—I can see how they once could have been useful—though I can't help but find this statement a little ironic on a site where all the content is highly dependent on emulators and ROMs, even if the former is legal in and of itself and the latter can't be found on the site. But it can't be denied that it's still piracy-adjacent.

Det man inte har i begåvning får man ta ut i energi. "I think I need to get to Snoop Dogg's level of high to be able to research this post." -Samsara Read my fanfic, One Piece: Pure Corruption

Posted: 1/5/2022 8:26 PM
(Edited: 1/5/2022 8:26 PM)

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FitterSpace

Active player (466)

Joined: 3/30/2012
Posts: 405

KennyMan666 wrote:

though I can't help but find this statement a little ironic on a site where all the content is highly dependent on emulators and ROMs, even if the former is legal in and of itself and the latter can't be found on the site. But it can't be denied that it's still piracy-adjacent.

I don't want to derail the topic, but I just wanted to comment on this real quick. I'm sure many, probably the majority, of TASes on this site were made by people that downloaded the games instead of dumping them from their own copy of the game. But it doesn't really matter how the TASes were made since the inputs sync on copies of the game that were dumped legally. Many of them even sync up on real hardware. But emulation unfortunately has a bad reputation because of its association with piracy, even if a lot of people dump their own games legally. I don't think that's something TASVideos can change on its own, but getting rid of torrents is something they can do to help with that at least. _{_{inb4 "citation needed"}}

Finished projects: 007: Nightfire 007: Nightfire "All Tokens" Goldeneye: 007 (Wii) Feng Shen Bang (Famicom)

Posted: 1/6/2022 6:33 AM

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One_hundred

Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 1

Lurker here. I still use torrents and find them valuable. I have a mid internet that can't stream ultra HD video - For the best video quality, I need to torrent. Torrents are not piracy, and I don't know why you should value the opinions of people who make that conflation. It would be like pandering to the TAS = Cheated Video crowd. There's no compelling reason to base your decisions on misinformation. As somebody else pointed out, especially because this site depends on ROMs, which are also incorrectly conflated with illegal activities. I don't think TASvideos will shake stigma around piracy so long as they make movies using ROMs and emulators (which will be Forever). I understand TASvideos isn't here to change the world or anything lol, but I think there's power in asserting that torrents are legal and a normal thing to partake in. It's just a good thing to do. I also strongly dislike the idea of depending almost entirely on YouTube. The browser feature of resuming problem downloads is hugely unreliable in my experience. It works sometimes but its an inconsistent strat. Torrents can be reliably resumed later. However, I don't have an answer to the data storage problem. If seeding a huge amount of data is too taxing, and you need to cut torrents for that reason, I understand.

Posted: 1/6/2022 6:37 AM

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EZGames69

He/They

Publisher, Reviewer, Expert player (4461)

Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2762

One hundred wrote:

I still use torrents and find them valuable. I have a mid internet that can't stream ultra HD video - For the best video quality, I need to torrent.

Are you able to download our downloadables from Archive.org?

[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing

Posted: 1/6/2022 9:01 AM

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feos

Site Admin, Skilled player (1254)

Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

One hundred wrote:

I also strongly dislike the idea of depending almost entirely on YouTube.

It was always Youtube and Archive. Torrents are seeded only by Archive. But guess what? Archive always creates torrents anyway, so it's still possible to use them to download whatever is present in its item. So we were kinda doing this extra work all the time, while instead we could have relied on Archive's torrents. We just don't link to Archive items, only directly to files. So maybe this part can be improved.

Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.

Posted: 1/7/2022 10:16 AM

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Radiant

Player (26)

Joined: 8/29/2011
Posts: 1206
Location: Amsterdam

In addition to what's already been said, I'm all in favor of streamlining the site for the sake of clarity and usability. Picking a random publication, I find it has six buttons to show that movie, and that's way too many. There's the obvious ones (watch on youtube, download movie file) and then there's a total of four buttons that show an "A/V", two over a mirror and two over bittorrent, and one is marked as "compatible" without noting what exactly it's compatible with. And that's way too many. Getting rid of the two bittorrent buttons is certainly a step in the right direction.

Indie game developer

Posted: 1/7/2022 3:00 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3573)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee

One hundred wrote:

Lurker here. I still use torrents and find them valuable. I have a mid internet that can't stream ultra HD video - For the best video quality, I need to torrent. Torrents are not piracy, and I don't know why you should value the opinions of people who make that conflation. It would be like pandering to the TAS = Cheated Video crowd. There's no compelling reason to base your decisions on misinformation. As somebody else pointed out, especially because this site depends on ROMs, which are also incorrectly conflated with illegal activities. I don't think TASvideos will shake stigma around piracy so long as they make movies using ROMs and emulators (which will be Forever). I understand TASvideos isn't here to change the world or anything lol, but I think there's power in asserting that torrents are legal and a normal thing to partake in. It's just a good thing to do. I also strongly dislike the idea of depending almost entirely on YouTube. The browser feature of resuming problem downloads is hugely unreliable in my experience. It works sometimes but its an inconsistent strat. Torrents can be reliably resumed later. However, I don't have an answer to the data storage problem. If seeding a huge amount of data is too taxing, and you need to cut torrents for that reason, I understand.

Thank you for your feedback! It is important to here that someone was using this feature. I will be removing this feature in the upcoming days. It's not a simple decision, I know some users will be impacted, but a large majority will be unaffected. Given the technical difficulties torrents give, I don't think we have enough users to justify it. As for "normalizing" torrents as a non-piracy tool, I think that battle is lost. It never started that way (in 2004 it started precisely to solve a need such as what TASVideos had), but I don't even know of a single site other than TASVideos that uses them in a legal way. We can try to stand up and battle against this "negative PR", but it isn't a hill I think we have to die on.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 1/7/2022 4:51 PM

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Sand

He/Him

Player (143)

Joined: 6/26/2018
Posts: 175

feos wrote:

We just don't link to Archive items, only directly to files. So maybe this part can be improved.

I like this idea. I have often wished that the archive.org links went to the item's /details/ page, not a direct /download/ URL. (I usually "Copy Link", paste, and manually edit the URL.) The details page not only has easy download and torrent links, but also favorites and review posts, and automatically derived lower-bandwidth video files you can play in the inline player. There's an opportunity for archive.org to serve even more of an archival purpose, by hosting emulator input files alongside the video, since an item can contain more than one file. Like MUGG, I used torrents a long time ago (I have a memory of watching a Mega Man X run while the video was half downloaded and enjoying the resulting video glitches), but I have not used them in years.

Posted: 1/8/2022 3:00 PM

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Memory

She/Her

Site Admin, Skilled player (1556)

Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1765
Location: Dumpster

Torrents are dead.

[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours

[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero

Posted: 1/9/2022 12:04 AM
(Edited: 1/9/2022 12:05 AM)

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FractalFusion

Editor, Expert player (2073)

Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3282

I remember using torrents a few times in the oldest days (back in 2005 or something). I have not used torrents in over 15 years. Even back in 2007 I would rather play back the movie file in emulator. These days, unless I am planning to TAS the game that I'm watching, I just use youtube-dl to download it from Youtube, or just watch on Youtube if it's very short.

Posted: 1/9/2022 9:08 PM

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Warepire

He/Him

Editor

Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)

adelikat wrote:

but I don't even know of a single site other than TASVideos that uses them in a legal way.

A lot of Linux distros still use torrents as one of their delivery methods. That said, I haven't used torrents for years, and never needed them here at TASVideos. I do believe archive supports resume, so tools like JDownloader should work just as well as torrent clients, as that doesn't mess up as often as browsers do with resume:able downloads.

Posted: 2/22/2022 3:07 PM
(Edited: 2/22/2022 3:08 PM)

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MESHUGGAH

Other

Skilled player (1918)

Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
Location: 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝑦𝔞𝔯

adelikat wrote:

Let's play a word association game, say the first word that comes to your mind when I say: "torrent".

Ocean

adelikat wrote:

...site using torrents legally...

archive.org, publicdomaintorrents.info, academictorrents.com, few universities... Probably there's a lot more (edit) white legal / grey legal websites using torrent technology to reduce bandwidth on the original source by helping with upstream from downloaders.

PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...

Posted: 2/22/2022 4:51 PM
(Edited: 2/22/2022 4:52 PM)

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Bobo_the_King

Player (80)

Joined: 8/5/2007
Posts: 865

EZGames69 wrote:

How the heck did they get literally every fact about us wrong?

There's a trope for that! On topic because I feel guilty only posting a joke to this old thread, I guess I'll be my usual contrarian self and say I feel lukewarm to positive toward torrents. I haven't used them with this site myself, but I like the option and they represent one component of a vision of the internet that values free and open exchange of information. Tools and resources like BizHawk, archive.org, Blender, Photopea, Lua, and Wikipedia among countless others put powerful (albeit often imperfect) resources at your fingertips with minimal to no advertisements because they are labors of love. I still use YouTube extensively as it remains the gold standard of video hosting websites, but their platform suuuuuuucks and is rapidly getting worse. So my simple feelings toward the (since resolved) question at hand are that archive.org is a great alternative to YouTube in the absence of torrents, but should archive.org go belly-up for whatever reason, expect me to come back here and pound on the table, demanding that we reintegrate torrents. Also, regarding torrents's sketchiness, as was stated elsewhere, our whole hobby is adjacent to piracy and it is laughable to me that torrents would sully our reputation. People who are convinced that this website is about distributing ROMs or so much as encouraging users to do so are going to see that regardless of whether torrents are associated with the site. The fact that torrents are associated with piracy should be a minimal factor in any decision whether to host them on the site.

Forum General Banish Torrents From The Site

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General

Banish Torrents From The Site