p2pnet - rss feed: Big DirectConnect Upgrade
p2pnet.net Application News:- Prodded by competition from DC++ and its variants, the release rate of official DirectConnect clients has accelerated considerably over the last few months, writes Slyck’s Tom Mennecke.
“Like many things in life, third party competition has improved many aspects of this and many other file-sharing communities,” he says.
Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>
Major DirectConnect Upgrade
By Thomas Mennecke - Slyck
While DirectConnect is somewhat of relic in the P2P world, it has managed to expand on its impressive popularity. Prompted by many of the innovative features of DC++ and its kin, the DirectConnect community has remained one of the top players despite the lack of many modern features.
However, this is about to change as Neo-Modus has finally introduced file hashing to DirectConnect. Specifically, the hashing feature in DirectConnect is based on the open source Tree Hash Exchange (THEX) format. The inevitable introduction of hash sites should make things interesting in this community. The following is from Neo-Modus’ change log:
Tiger Tree Hash Support - ‘Find More Sources’!
Today’s a big day for Direct Connect. We’ve released a new weekly build that brings a great new feature into the client - Tiger Tree Hashes. Most of you won’t, don’t and shouldn’t know what this is. What it lets you do is what matters. Tiger Tree Hashes allow Direct Connect to find alternate sources for the files in your queue. These alternate matches are based on the content of the file, rather than its name. So, if two people have two copies of the same file, but with totally different names, and you start downloading from 1 of them and they leave, Direct Connect will automatically find the other copy and start downloading!
The feature required quite a bit of work to integrate, but make sure to try it out by right clicking on files in your queue and choosing ‘Auto Complete’ or ‘Find exact copy’. If ‘Find exact copy’ isn’t in your menu, it means you started downloading the original file from a user who did not support tiger tree hashing - no worries, as more people start using this build, the feature will become more prevalent.
Here’s a list of some other changes -
- Tiger Tree Hashing! As described at http://open-content.net/specs/draft-jchapweske-thex-02.html
- Automatic download completion. Direct Connect now finds alternate sources for file-transfers closed by remote peers. It can find alternates by Tiger Tree Hash (Exact Match) or it can choose files with similar names and the exact same file size.
- If the remote peer supports Tiger Tree Hashes, Direct Connect will verify data as it is written to disk. This prevents transfers from becoming corrupted.
- ZLib Compression
- GetZBlock/GetTestZBlock support
- Client-2-Client Tiger Tree Hash Exchanged via GetMeta command
- Preference to control automatic download completion. Choices are ‘Exact’ vs ‘Apparent’. An exact match occurs only when you have the tiger tree hash of the file in question and are able to find another client exporting that same tiger tree hash. Hence, both clients must support hashing. Direct Connect currently works with BCDC++ at this point. An apparent match is a file with a similar name and the exact same size.
- The back-end of the queue (Not GUI) has been re-written.
- When a file completes all queued files with he same local path are removed from the queue.
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