Some Bits: Nelson's weblog

BitTorrent dumper

I was experimenting with BitTorrent, so I wrote a little file dumper to see what was in the mysterious .torrent files. The code doesn’t just parse the protocol; it’ll dump whatever the decoder can find. Sample output: 
info                
  length          41470132
  piece length    262144
  name            Halo2_E3.wmv
  pieces          [159 SHA-1 values]
announce        http://news.gametab.com:6969/announce
The format seems too simple in one way - fixed-size chunks. I’d expected some sort of recursive file definition. It’s also too complex in one way - I don’t think multi-files should be in a file transport mechanism. And really the .torrent file should be XML.

But it’s easy to criticize; BitTorrent is still awfully cool.

tech • bittorrent