rich007

Absolutely Kenneth,

I for one would appreciate if you could seed them... I'm getting currently last year's stages 11, 14 and 15 and yours would nicely complete the most important stuff from TdF '04... TIA

thewalrus

I'll bump this thread back to the top with a mention that stage 3 is now up for torrenting:

https://www.mininova.org/tor/67537

I'm getting 48KB/s on it right now.

krazyderek

anyone have that stage from 2003 tour, where JUAN from Rabobank climbed some big hill all by himself??? can't remember the stage, but i'd love to see that one again.

***Butch***

Getting stage 3 now. Thanks so much for putting these up (whoever is doing this).

gattm99

HEY thanks for the torrents, now everyone remember to seed (leave the download open as long as possible even after it finishes)

BuzzOrHowl

Thanks to everyone who is upping races and seeding what they've downloaded.
I also follow auto racing, and I've been using some torrent sites that exclusively supply motor sport torrents. They have just about every auto race from any where in the world, with new torrents added several times daily. Wouldn't it be great to have a torrent site like that for Cycling?
Does anyone have a clue how to set one up?

On other thing... most of the Motor sport torrents have much better video quality than the tour stages I've seen so far; almost a HDTV level of resolution, really crystal clear. Anyone know how to capture bike stuff at that level of quality? I'm pretty clueless myself.

BTW, the Auto stuff is in DivX

pedex

Tracker software for setting up a server with a database is freely available these days, but it doesnt even have to be that complicated, even a simple ftp site would work, just need a place to upload the torrents and a decent connection to run the actual torrent trackers for the torrent seeds.The bandwidth gets real expensive real fast, ive seen some torrent sites go from 100 members to 20k members in about 2 months, its quite popular these days despite the RIAA and MPAA efforts.

As far as the quality goes, whoever did stage 1 did pretty good, stage 2 wasnt nearly as good, not enough bitrate for the resolution used, the higher the resolution, the higher the bitrate needs to be, if it isnt high enough, the picture gets pixelated too much(blocky looking), the tradeoff though is the file size gets bigger.Compression method used for the video has an effect as well, mpeg1 and mpeg2 which is used in vcd's and dvd's doesnt have nearly as good a quality at lower bitrates as mpeg4 or some of the others and doesnt provide as much compression of the video either.The newer HDTV standard allows mpeg4 which will help alot.

taikmata

its great to have torrents for cycling stuff - however think its just easier to make use of the available torrent sites out there. cheaper. less headache. the bandwidth cost comes up to a bit too.

stage 1 - 3 were done by the same person, "rollfaster" from demonoid https://www.demonoid.com/

and me, i'm just helping to upload the torrents to mininova and torrentspy and naturally in the seeding process too since registration at demonoid is closed

Gustaf

Thanks for the torrents.
if the author of this thread could just list the links in the origional post this would help out a TON

fixedude

as someone overseas without a TV, i'm bumping this to say "thanks!" for the torrents! please keep it up!

BuzzOrHowl

Hey, I'm watching Stage 3 off mininova and it ended before the sprint! does anyone have a complete copy? Thanks.

taikmata

the stage 3 from mininova is a complete copy. i got it from there too

Drayko

I just got the mininova stage 3 and it ends early. Video is only 1:27:44 long and finishes before the sprint (15km to end or so). Also it seems that the vid was blown up to 200% actual size (like stage 2 also) and saved like that. It is still the same clear resolution as stage 1 but this makes the file much bigger. Anyway to resize it?

BuzzOrHowl

Yeah, mine is 1:27:44 as well. I went back to Mininova and downloaded it again, with the same result. Anybody got the complete file?

pedex

only if you re-encode it to a smaller size, you lose a slight amount of quality anytime you do this, every conversion you do to it causes a small amount of detail to disappear

taikmata

stage 4 - https://www.mininova.org/tor/68006

by any chance are you using fat32 file system? since stage 4 is more than 1 gB in size, then you will have issues saving the full size.

solution, convert from fat32 to ntfs or i will try to see if i can get the end for you in one way or another.

Drayko

Nope, drive is ntfs, I have 1.5 gig movie files that play fine.
It is the full 1.3 gig file on the hd. I used Windows Media Player to play it, any problems there? I'll try a different one.

rich007

Taikmata,

Thanks for your daily updates with links to torrents... It is really appreciated... Seems like whoever does it, switched to DivX encoding this time... Hope, it'll be a better quality (not that I mind that much... )

For everyone else, keep it seeded once you download the torrent, please. It makes it that much faster to download when there are more uploaders. Thanks.

Also, I have the stage 3 and it is complete (2:00:25 long) and yes I have NTFS file system... Interesting, never thought it could have been the problem. Nice to know

rich007

Funny you mention it, my Windows Media Player 10 wouldn't even play any of the first three stages. I had sound but no video... (Yes, I do have XviD codecs installed and played tons of other XviD-encoded movies in WMP, so I was a bit puzzled)...

Now, I keep watching it now in VideoLAN (or VLC Media Player, same thing) and it plays without any problems...

taikmata

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

one of the best free players out there

and the xvid codec - https://www.xvid.org/downloads.html

and yup, rollfaster decided to use another codec to speed up the encoding process. new to this and its all try and learn thing..

Drayko

Update, just downloaded VLC player (very nice btw, wish I had found it earlier) and Stage 3 works in full. Windows media player is the problem! Very weird I must say.

pedex

VLC is pretty cool, so is Mplayer, both are open source.If you get really serious about video with PC's, my experience has been that linux is really the best option, it has better usability and options, no restrictions, and best of all, its free.Plus encoding/decoding video is usually pretty CPU intensive and under a heavy load windows doesnt multitask well at all, its kernel task scheduler sucks, plus the windows GUI is a resource hog, bad combination.

Drayko

I know what you mean. I don't know linux that well but I may just try to learn it more this summer. It's already installed on this comp (our main family computer, dual OS [XP & Linux] dad mostly uses Linux, everyone else windows) so I really have no excuses. I've seen linux and I think it uses the memory and processor much more efficiently than windows. The comp is P4, 3 G, 1 g ram but windows doesn't seem much different than on a P3 (or even our stripped p2 system for that matter) while Linux just blazes at times, even when my dad has some big project or model loaded up.
Sorry for the tangent...
Vid works well, working on 4 now. Merci Beaucoup!!

KennethToronto

bump ^

keep the torrents seeded

taikmata

Stage 1 - Fromentine to Noirmoutier-en-l'Ile, 19 km/12 mi
Stage 2 - Challans to Les Essarts, 181.5 km/112.5 miles
Stage 3 - La Châtaigneraie to Tours, 212.5 km/132 miles
Stage 4 - Tours to Blois, 67.5 km/42 miles
Stage 5 - Chambord to Montargis, 183 km/113.7 miles