Watching a torrent

[peter hh]

Is there a way of watching a torrent whilst it is downloading, even tho the torrent is not yet finished?

[mmm-five]

If you mean watching the video you're downloading via BitTorrent, then no!

The way torrents work is to break the source up into tiny pieces and download/upload from lots of sources at the same time, hence while you only upload at your max upload speed while you can download at much faster speeds as you're getting lots of pieces at the same time.

Unfortunately that also means that the pieces you'll download are not going to be contiguous, and so watching it would be difficult!

[aldi]

Sometimes you can get watchable fragments before it's finished, I just drag the temp file from the torrent programs temp folder onto the video player and it just gives it its best shot. Sometimes you get quite a bit, sometimes nothing, usually have to skip on manually when it gets to a missing bit. Very variable. Usually good enough to make sure you're downloading the right thing though. You can't bank on being able to watch the first 50% of the file if the torrent is 50% done though for reasons explained above.

[thepassenger]

As aldi said you can often get away with it however in general terms you'll often get garbled video and audio. If your downloading multiple files inside of an archive (or as a group) you might end up with fragments of the various videos/music appearing randomly.

[gopher]

Also if the video is in a number of parts in some torrent clients (azureus is one) you set the priority of the first part to high and that will be downloaded sooner.

I recently found a torrent of the original Mary Whitehouse experience tv series and did this for episode 1, then 2 etc.

Also, as has been mentioned some media players (such as VLC media player) will play partial files.