Schinckel.net

I’ve ranted about this type of thing before, but one thing that really pisses me off is when people attempt to compress already compressed files. I love the BBC program Spooks, but because they are still showing a series that is about 3 years old in my country, I’ve been forced to download the series via slightly shady means.

So, I’ve just grabbed the first few episodes of series 6. And the joker who made the first episode decided to rar th avi file. And split it into 15MB chunks. Why would you do this? At best, it is just slightly annoying (you have to unrar the file before you can use it), at worst it means you can’t access the file. If I were unable to snarf the entire torrent, then I would not be able to unrar the file, meaning I could not view any of the video. To put that in perspective, when I grabbed a Grand Designs episode I had missed on local TV, I only got 99.3% of the file. But I can still watch it in a viewer, and I can’t even see where the data is missing. I would not be able to do this with the Spooks episode.

Luckily, the whole thing downloaded, so it isn’t a big issue. Not this time.