Need help with ctorrent134c and playing movies

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Bancobusto
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Need help with ctorrent134c and playing movies

#1 Post by Bancobusto »

Hello, this is my first post, and I must admit that I have zero experience with running a commmandline based bittorrent program. The absolute only reason that I staill have Windows 2000 still installed on my computer is that I enjoy being able to download a movie every day for my fiance when she gets off of work. I'm beeing honest. I've installed Puppy to my hard-drive and it really does meet all of my requirement, except I
1- cannot setup a working bittorrrent program
2- cannot setup a working Soulseek compatible program
3- cannot seem to setup a decent movie player (xine really is NOT good for movies, at least on my machine, it crashes EVEry time that I ask it politely to go into fullscreen mode... and the mplayer dot-pup does not work at all, no video, no sound, nothing.
So, I am in no way dissing Puppy, as I find it lightning fast and way more reliable then other distro's such as DSL, whic I've found to be slow and unable to actually last for more than three days without litterrraly corrupting itself and becoming unable to boot. All the Big name distro's run like garbage on my machine, which I find deppressing because I read all about how people with Way older and shittier computers are running fine. I REALLY like puppy, and I realize that I'm rambling, so could someone please create a HOW-TO guide for using Ctorent? btw, the links on the dot-pup page do NOT work, except fot the 134c realease....
Much love, cheers


Please help me, i'm an ignorant bastard...............

P3, 128mg ram, 700 megahertz processor, but I don't understand why everything runs SOOOO poorly excepy Puppy!

ps - i've tried searching for answers to my problem, but have found nothing. Either I really don't know what I'm doing ,or this is a concern worthy of consideration for us newbies
Freedom isn't just a Puppy-Linux forum member!

Rich
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 19:00
Location: Middlesbrough - UK

#2 Post by Rich »

Firstly, welcome to the wonderful world of Puppy. Glad you like what you see so far.

As far as Ctorrent goes, I can't help you myself, as I probably know less than you ( although, being on dial up at the moment means that movie downloads are a bit ambitious for me ).
Gxine in fullscreen mode crashes. This is a known bug. Clicking on the maximise square will fill the screen, but with the window borders and taskbar still visible. A roll of black electrical tape around the monitor cures this, but it's not an ideal solution. ! :D

Rich

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Bancobusto
Posts: 168
Joined: Mon 13 Jun 2005, 20:52
Location: Vancouver Island

#3 Post by Bancobusto »

Well, I'm glad to get a response so fast, I really appreciate that, I find it verry indicative of how the Puppy project works in general... Actual involvement, with the goal and emphasis being to help people understand and learn the absolutely amazing alternative to a marketing, capitalist-driven world of Microsoft and apple.... Point being, I really find it exciting, for reasons that are perhaps too personal to mention, to be able too actually do the stuff that I want to do on the computer without seeing a logo from a company that I litterally believe is not worthy of my day-old shit, fed to then with an intrevenous tube just for fun... long live the FREE, open-source software development experience, it truly is a kick in the face to company's such as Microsoft, who,. we all know, really, are a bunch of money-hungry BASTARDS in suits, giving the right people rim-jobs, while treating the rest of like f^cking tools... rambling again, soryyy, thank you.

much love, cheers
Freedom isn't just a Puppy-Linux forum member!

Rich
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 19:00
Location: Middlesbrough - UK

#4 Post by Rich »

have you tried Mplayer?
Again, I have no experience of this one either, but it's available as a Dotpup download and might solve the fullscreen problem for you.

If there's anyone else on here using Mplayer then feel free to chip in and educate the pair of us !

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Bancobusto
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#5 Post by Bancobusto »

Yes, i have tried the mplayer dot-pup, and I've gotten zero results with it. Nothing. It's a drag, because really, being able to play movies and such is important to me. I am perhaps (unrightly) assuming that everyone else knows what they are doing more than myself and somehow has gotten themselves set-up in such a way that they can do the things that they want to do, but I am looking for a real alternative to Microsoft that really works, because they actually piss me off. Thank you for the response, I appreciate it, and am looking forward to someone who has literall experience with this responding in a calm, reasonable, helpfll way..... c'mon, takle a newbie under your wing and help? I don't bite, and even if I did you could always get a tetnous shot!

Thank you Rich for being my welcoming commmitee, I genuinely appreciate that.

Much love, Cheers
Freedom isn't just a Puppy-Linux forum member!

GuestToo
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#6 Post by GuestToo »

i thought the ctorrent dotpup links to goosee were ok, but maybe they weren't ... they don't seem to be working now

i usually use ctorrent134c anyway ... it seems to work on vfat (Windows) partitions

i tried downloading a Knoppix iso today using ctorrent134c, and it wouldn't work on a vfat drive ... probably because it was a torrent that downloads a folder with 5 or 6 files in it

basically, you download the torrent file, put the torrent file where you want to download it, open an rxvt window there (right click the folder in rox-filer, and click Xterm Here)

for help, type ctorrent134c -h

to start the ctorrent program, type something like
ctorrent134c -B 400 movie.avi.torrent

-B 400 sets the maximum speed to 400kBs (up and down)
it won't download very fast if you use the default maximum speed

you may want to give it more ram ... the default it 16 megs
-C 32 would give it 32 megs of ram

the default port is 2706
it will try ports from 2706 to 2106
to set it to use port 51234, for example, use this option:
-p 51234

so to download using a torrent file called movie.avi.torrent, using 32 megs of ram, using port 12543, at a maximum speed of 300 kBs, type:
ctorrent134c -C 32 -p 12543 -B 300 movie.avi.torrent

ctorrent may not always work ... if doesn't work well saving files on vfat drives

there's more information on the ctorrent web page

Azureus seems to work fairly well in Puppy ... you need to install Java first (about 84 megs installed ... they recommend the update 3 version)

screenshot: http://tinypic.com/5xn01w

mplayer works quite well on my 256 meg ram, 900 khz machine ... no problems running full screen ... your machine might be a bit too slow to run full screen (Puppy's vesa driver uses the cpu to rescale the picture)

do you get any error messages if you open an rxvt window and type gmplayer2

i can only upload 1 meg packages, so my mplayer dotpup package downloads binaries for another distro (DSL actually) ... it might have been compiled for i586 or i686 cpus, and may not work with your P3 cpu ... the Vector Linux binaries will also work in Puppy, i think they are compiled for i386 cpus

i don't know much about soulseek ... most of the Linux soulseek programs seem to use python ... Puppy doesn't have python, python is about 20 megs

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Bancobusto
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#7 Post by Bancobusto »

This is what I get when I open a terminal and type gmplayer2


# gmplayer2
ln: /opt/mplayer: No such file or directory
MPlayer 1.0pre6-3.3.1 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel Celeron 2/Pentium III Coppermine,Geyserville (Family: 6, Stepping: 3)
Detected cache-line size is 32 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled with runtime CPU detection - WARNING - this is not optimal!
To get best performance, recompile MPlayer with --disable-runtime-cpudetection.

Xlib: extension "XFree86-VidModeExtension" missing on display ":0.0".
vo: X11 running at 1024x768 with depth 16 and 16 bpp (":0.0" => local display)
Xlib: extension "XFree86-VidModeExtension" missing on display ":0.0".
[skin] file ( /opt/mplayer/share/mplayer/Skin/default/skin ) not found.
Skin not found (default).


I've tried reinstalling mpaley, it just own't run fullscreeen - it crashes immediately..... however, 3 days ago when i installed it, I got absolutelt zero sound and zero picture, just wouldn't work....

Vectot Linux will NOT install properly onto my computer - every time, at the end of the installation and I have to reboot, it says HDD error -cannot boot from disc...

Perhaps, I'm beginning to believe, there is something wrong with my machine.... I mean, it runs everything slower than it ought to, but i can at least run VLC on windows and play movies allright... it pisses me off that I cannot replicate the same environment, because that's what my point is...

I don't mind having to type a lot more stuf in the command-line, i can deal with it if that's what it takes to overcome windows.....

Much love, cheers
Freedom isn't just a Puppy-Linux forum member!

Guest

#8 Post by Guest »

Ok, have gotten some better results, but have decided to download 1.03 and see if i have any better luck.... can now get mplayer to play just about anything, just not full screen. Sorry for the delay, and thanks to those that have offerrred help - it doesn't fall on deaf ears. Will hear from me again, and look forwars to helping others once i know my ass from my bible, or so the saying goes....
'specially, thanks for the info on the on ctorrent.
Much love, cheers.

GuestToo
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#9 Post by GuestToo »

you need to have a /opt dir to symlink to, so mplayer can find the mplayer files ... i should add a line to create /opt if it doesn't exist ... i symlinked to /opt rather than /usr because Puppy sometimes cleans out /usr

if mplayer is till not working, try making /opt if it doesn't exist
(using rox or type mkdir /opt ... then see if mplayer will run ... /opt should be in ram and will disappear when you reboot, unless you have an option 2 install

gxine does usually crash if you try to play a movie full screen ... mplayer seems to work ok on my machine ... your machine might be a bit too slow to play a movie full screen using a vesa driver ... another distro with a driver for your video card might work better

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Bancobusto
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#10 Post by Bancobusto »

Well, since my last post I've learned alot in a short time about Puppy, and Linux in general.

I've managed to get Azureus up and running, and it seems fine.

Still no luck with playing video full-screen, but that could just be my machine.

However, since my last post it's come to my attention that ctorrent may not have been working properly for me because I was downloading to a FAT32 partition. I have since created a 10GB partition (ext3) and will continue experimenting.

For example, I much prefer wget to the Firefox browser for downloading large file - with wget, i'm allready in a position to md5sum the file....
Also, why use more resources than needed?

So, I'm giving Ctorrent another try.

(Question... Why is it called Ctorrent? Am I mistaken in believing that most C programs are written in GUI? Or am I way off? Guess it don't matter much...)

Cheers to you all :D

GuestToo
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#11 Post by GuestToo »

mplayer should play full screen

you seem to have a missing /opt dir
you can install this bugfix and it should fix that problem:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=7790#7790

i think that version of mplayer was compiled for i686 cpus (i didn't compile it myself) ... so it probably won't run on a 386 or 486 or 586

ctorrent definitely does not download properly to a vfat (Windows) partition ... ctorrent134c does seem to work on a vfat partition ... it prints an error message, but if you leave it running, it eventually seems to download ok ... though there can be problems with torrents that download more than 1 file

ctorrent is called ctorrent because it's written in C ... the original bit torrent program was written in Python ... Azureus is written in Java ... ctorrent is a lot smaller that the Python or Java versions, and probably uses less of the computer's resources

GUI is Graphical User Interface ... windows and buttons and scroll bars and things ... GUI's (as opposed to the text mode command line, like DOS), can be written in almost any computer language ... most of the Gnu-Utils command line programs (like ls, cp, mv, cd, md5sum, top ...) are written in C

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Bancobusto
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#12 Post by Bancobusto »

Thanks GuestToo.


I created the /opt directory, that doesn't seem to be my problem. Mplayer will play whatever I throw at it, just not full-screen. (good work with the patch, though!)

It starts to stutter and the sound stops synching up with the video.

On my debian partition, all is OK, except I'm using VLC to watch movies etc.

That's why I like the idea of having Xfree86 - in theory, I could copy files over and get the same results.

(also, I realize that I've come to some rather bizarre conclusions about C... guess that's bound to happen when you have no humans in real-time to discuss-learn things with.... I'm kinda regretting moving to The Island, only for that reason though...)

Thanks for the info, much obliged :D
Last edited by Bancobusto on Fri 29 Jul 2005, 07:17, edited 1 time in total.

GuestToo
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#13 Post by GuestToo »

vesa drivers don't support picture scaling by the video card, so the cpu is doing all the work

to play a movie full screen probably requires at least an 800 mhz cpu

you can run mplayer from the command line (type mplayer2 rather than mplayer ... mplayer sends all messages to /dev/null to avoid filling up xerrs.txt) and experiment with the options, like which sound and which video driver to use

if you had xfree86 and the driver for your card, you would have hardware acceleration, and the video card would be doing most of the work

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#14 Post by Bancobusto »

That clarifies things for me, G2. Thanks. I have a 700mhz cpu... not in the best of health, either.....

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