Bringing back the Ultimate Halo Fragvid Collection?

Edit: Updated Link https://s3.amazonaws.com/Bjorn-Dropbox/Preserving-History-The-Ultimate-H...

I was talking to an old member from here, he was looking for his montage and we started talking about that big montage torrent. So after about half an hour or so I found the torrent file through a combo of the Wayback machine, snooping on Halo2Forum's archives and then coming across a 2013 capture of the thread and lowstrife's links.

This is what I found. It has one peer who isn't seeding. Now I can seed, I seed already in a way since I use unlimited offline backup to Crashplan, I can let my torrent program contribute since my internet and storage are much more robust these days. I regularly push 50GB per day over it, and that's like 1/8th my upload speed so I would be fine with setting it up on my machine to get it back into the masses of people.  I only have maybe 10Gb of old Halo Videos on my machine to put into the torrent so I'd still need someone or a group of people who have it. I don't have a seedbox but my workstation is on 24/7 anyways and I occasionally push 2TB per month on my internet. with 12Mbps upload.

 

So just curious who has the collection or we would need to make a new torrent file. I'm one who is a fan of Archival and I'd like to help get that going again. And 230gb is nothing for me. I record and delete 10x that every day.

https://mega.co.nz/#!ccVhTTjS!NizX79waHXHMBodW1n6BSAf7wIX9rpO75I5_9ggnP_o

https://mega.co.nz/#!ZYVFEajZ!r6UGZog8B2v59OqivS_Vu6pBiLKLlkN1awbf5HhcheQ

one of those is the correct torrent, not sure which one you have but I checked it a while ago when we were working on the video archive, i think its the .ra.r

Bjorn was seeding at that time. I dont have the full torrent myself I think I only have the halo 2 section.

We had more ambitious plans than the current system with the video page, where downloads were included (as some folks might remember from site launch). The videos in there that had their origin to the torrent do have a physical files behind them. At launch we had a lot of things to fix and improve and we didnt manage to smooth out the up/download feature quickly so we cut it 'temporarily' and I havent really thought about it much since.

There was a goal to have the entire torrent set up in the system (using a google sheet to fill in editor, gp contributor, youtube link, title by file name) but mike, myself and a few others didnt manage to get it all in (I think we finished up the h2 section, small part of h3 and halo ce). I did throw in the important videos from my own montage collection that didnt overlap with the torrent, which was about 34 gigs, those files are also tied to videos on the videos page.

thought Id share that in case you guys wanna work on updating it or whatever that might give some perspective on perhaps doing that through the site instead of a torrent. 

If it's through a site, it would be hosted on the site and server I'd imagine, hosting costs. Though I guess that was considered when putting it together. I'm a bit of a worry when it comes to losing memories and stuff so I got into a mood of wanting to archive it.

Yeah, I forget what our exact plan was but perhaps it was donors only/premium membership or something? Kinda depending on its use we were gonna see how to go about it I think.

The easy search option with the meta data on the videos page would allow to quickly find and download the individual vids you want, instead of putting 200+ GB's of video files on your HD and once in a while looking through them on video file name basis (which is.. lets say suboptimal).

But yeah, at least we do have those files on the server, I understand the feeling of wanting to have them on your HD for sure. If every new vid that was added to the videos page wouldve also had a hard physical file connected to it that'd have been so sweet.

Yea I don't mean to say that the best method for people  finding videos is through a single torrent, certainly isn't. More so to rekindle the distribution of the archive since already it's hard for some people to find specific videos.
I have the collection, I've just been having hard drive problems lately. I have a new banana pi that I am using to seed now, but it will likely take me a long time to hash check all the data. It's hash checking now, and will be done hash checking in around 2.5 hours. I'll post here again with my IP and port so you guys can add me as a peer to download it from me. 
Alright, no rush on anything just wanted to get a discussion going since I haven't kept up with the site much. 
Welp, bad news. I tried hash checking my copy of the collection and ended up completely deleting it. Unfortunately the original hard drive on which I kept it does not work anymore, so I don't have a copy of the collection, but I'll be happy to redownload + reseed. Apologies.

I have it on my home server somewhere.

EDIT:

Not sure if this is everything but its a start.

It's not everything, unfortunately. Damn, I had it on two hard drives and now I have it on none, it's so frustrating. 
If we're able to get the collection together, would we be able to add to it?
I'm sure you can create another torrent with added content if you so desired. 
I messaged Fragtality and Low Strife in the hopes that they still have a copy of the collection, since they were the two that put it together originally. 

You all are a bunch of bitches but you're all amazing.

 

I'm working on bringing my raid array back from the dead... Yet again. Last time I'm doing RAID5 and building a new computer then procrastinating.  Anyway hopefully you all will see a 100% seeder on what data I do have, I do not think I participated in the 2013 update so I just have the original that was created back in the day. We'll see.

ight, thanks strife.

@Renzy I think that's most of it tho, I think there were some Halo Reach beta vids in there as well or something. @bjorn_248 what else was in there?

@slater 

ah right the vista map, I have that I think.

It's up, I'm seeding.

 

I would recommend promoting this for the next 30 days, I rented a temporary seedbox to seed this thing, so we have a assload of bandwidth to let people download this if anyone's interested. It's in progress right now, but I only have a so-so connection so the upload will take about a week to upload initally. I can only do about 25GB\day upload.

 

Yeah, I forget what our exact plan was but perhaps it was donors only/premium membership or something? Kinda depending on its use we were gonna see how to go about it I think.

The easy search option with the meta data on the videos page would allow to quickly find and download the individual vids you want, instead of putting 200+ GB's of video files on your HD and once in a while looking through them on video file name basis (which is.. lets say suboptimal).

But yeah, at least we do have those files on the server, I understand the feeling of wanting to have them on your HD for sure. If every new vid that was added to the videos page wouldve also had a hard physical file connected to it that'd have been so sweet.

 

To be honest, Youtube is probably the best place to put all of this stuff. There are about 1000 useless\crappy videos that take up little space plus a few duplicates (higher quality), but the majority could make their way to Youtube and stay there. That would be a great bank in the optimal viewing format IMO. Can't beat free.

You're the man <3
infinity rep <3
thanks strife, perhaps Ill do a write up on it tonight to front page or something
I think I got my torrent sorted out. Kept using uTorrent and it would stop at 1.54GB every time, so I switched to qBitTorrent, at 3GB now going steady.  Then, once it's downloaded I can leave it up indefinitely.
ok fp'd, if you think I forgot to mention anything lemeknow

It's up, I'm seeding.

 

I would recommend promoting this for the next 30 days, I rented a temporary seedbox to seed this thing, so we have a assload of bandwidth to let people download this if anyone's interested. It's in progress right now, but I only have a so-so connection so the upload will take about a week to upload initally. I can only do about 25GB\day upload.

 

Yeah, I forget what our exact plan was but perhaps it was donors only/premium membership or something? Kinda depending on its use we were gonna see how to go about it I think.

The easy search option with the meta data on the videos page would allow to quickly find and download the individual vids you want, instead of putting 200+ GB's of video files on your HD and once in a while looking through them on video file name basis (which is.. lets say suboptimal).

But yeah, at least we do have those files on the server, I understand the feeling of wanting to have them on your HD for sure. If every new vid that was added to the videos page wouldve also had a hard physical file connected to it that'd have been so sweet.

 

To be honest, Youtube is probably the best place to put all of this stuff. There are about 1000 useless\crappy videos that take up little space plus a few duplicates (higher quality), but the majority could make their way to Youtube and stay there. That would be a great bank in the optimal viewing format IMO. Can't beat free.

I used to keep all the vids on my old HDD but Im pretty sure I wiped it shortly after giving away the channel, but you can always download, then reupload them from youtube 1 | 2

I won't DL it but I wanted to say that this is a great Idea and pretyy cool that people took their time to bring it back up.  Is there the possibility of adding new content to the file? (5 years of great videos missing). MAYBE someone should make a second one with videos of the last 5 years, just a thought.

I don't think the archiving systems of the last few years will be anywhere as good. I made this at the perfect time when A) my collection was massive on it's own, and I B) collected hundreds of videos from community members who submitted everything they had as well. I think it will be difficult to replicate that this time around.

 

I said a long time ago I also wouldn't work on any 2.0 project, it was a one & done for me. But I'll happily keep this one around, I don't plan on getting rid of the data anytime soon. But if anyone else wants to do it, I'd be happy to support. I'd recommend Youtube this time around though, torrents are becoming a thing of the past.

Youtube would be a good option but it wouldn't support physical copies like the torrent archive. It would be nice to have all the montages on one youtube channel and then have an alternate source for physical copies.
Hell I would volunteer to start uploading everything to a single channel. I don't have the best upload speed but its around 15mbps which is pretty decent. What youtube channel?  Thehaloforum channel? I was under the impression that the channel wasn't suppose to have random tages uploaded to it.

You mean this torrent? there's already a channel that uploaded a shitton of this torrent. 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdlc2pmupsSZKrLcu121drg

not sure if he just did the h2 montages but when I was working on the video page I found all the obscure videos from the torrent on there

 

or do you mean the videos post 2010 Thomas?

We're not doing much with the THF channel, anything is open for discussion. 

I mean, I could probably do both. But there are so many new montages post 2010. Maybe we could get people submitting all the montages they have downloaded to get caught up again. As for the thf channel, I don't know what nv1 wants to do with it, but since we have always been centered around montages I think it would be pretty cool if we had all the videos that came out of this place on our very own channel.
The question is why would we want to make copies of existing montages on youtube. The added value of our video page idea was both the existing youtube stream and the physical file download in an easy to search meta data format. So I'd say if you want to do something to preserve halo montages of the last 5 years Id start with collecting the files of significant montages and only uploading those to youtube that arent on youtube. once we have the files collected we can see if we either make a torrent or we do something in-site.
Alright, then we should start collecting montages post 2010?

I'd say so.

Perhaps we can start thinking subdivisions, you dont want to start gathering files and then having to categorize them later when you dont know what they are anymore. Instead of just a which Halo games gameplay category perhaps we can think of more, with a google doc you can make multiple variables with which you can make playlists. For example Movie Comp 2014 entries could be a category.  To use a system like we did here http://www.thehaloforum.com/forum/thf-vips/149-montage-archive

Also selection parameters, just montages or machinema, glitch type stuff as well etc.

Have a good set up and idea of what we want to do before you ask for stuff or else you'll get flooded with a lot of meh (pretty much anything that isnt in the first preserving history), you'll have no way to order the meh and as file sizes have gotten dramatically bigger you'll have an HD full of files you dont know what to do with. Preserving history requires a system that decides what's worth preserving, else it's just hoarding.  

Well if it's a torrent, maybe you can organize it in folders by game first, then by editor or player? Depending on how organized you want to be. For glitches or misc. Videos you can have a separate folder within the h1/h2/h3/etc folder

You can keep the folders per game, else it becomes a fucking mindfuck of a foldermaze, but if you write it all up in a sheet, add the sheet to the torrent > people can search in the sheet on all those things and then just search the filenames. Then if you ever want to do more with it than just a torrent you can.

Im just saying it would be a good opportunity to do it right and keep it somewhat compact, instead of just a boatload of files some choice percentage of which no one is gonna watch. 

If youre gonna ask people to send in their files, let them fill in some metadata in a PM to you (not much work for a few files, also restricts people from sending in videos they dont find worth the trouble), then have a google sheet (only some people may edit (like VIPs), for fear of fuckery) open to view so people can see which videos have already been sent in.

 

So if I wanted to send you a few vids for the pres history #2 I would send you a PM with:

download link to 3 files

file name1 - title - editor - gp contributors - halo games incl. [ optional: - youtube link - other info]

file name2 - title - editor - gp contributors - halo games incl. [ optional: - youtube link - other info]

file name3 - title - editor - gp contributors - halo games incl. [ optional: - youtube link - other info]

(I'd say just use the set up Nv1 made with the google sheet in that VIp thread I linked)

those lines you would then copy paste into the sheet and you would copy the files into the fitting folder

I did that for about 200 videos of my personal collection that I checked weren't in the torrent to add to the videos page, Im sure there are others with enough motivation to add significant amounts.

 

I alluded to glitches and Misc as in, do you want those videos entered? Or do you want to keep it to montages? because its hard to value misc videos, which do you want, which dont you want. Easier to give clear restrictions on what to include than take all and have to figure it out yourself.