I hate to say it, but all the fakes Im getting is really degrading the experience of using ted.

I've just gotten 3 fakes because I lay in wait with my log ready, and here's the common info:

All 3 were downloaded from isohunt,
and Im guessing they all make use of some kind of explot to appear to have more seeds and jump to the top. Here is tracker info in case it is helpful:

11.rarbg.com:80/announce: 6620 seeds
photodiode.mine.nu:6969/announce: 4932 seeds
tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce: 4605 seeds
tracker.bittorrent.am:80/announce: 1 seeds
tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce: 1 seeds
tracker1.torrentum.pl:80/announce: 0 seeds
85.17.189.130:80/announce: 0 seeds
tracker.ilibr.org:6969/announce: 0 seeds
80.190.151.40:80/announce: 0 seeds

For reference here are the 3 torrent items:

http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/1363 ... ab=summary
http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/1363 ... ab=summary
http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/1363 ... ab=summary

Im going to remove isohunt, but I think we need a better solution
hopefully somebody that knows more about this than me can come up with a scheme.

I noticed that these torrents are usually added WELL before the show could have aired. So I wonder if a workable approach would be to identify torrents available too soon, and blacklist them.

Either that, or identify the exploit that is allowing them to have more seeders than they actually do, and ban those trackers.


thanks

Cory

Thanks for your investigation! this really helps us to make decisions how to stop these fakes coming in.

For the long term (it is already a planned new feature) we want to filter torrents that were posted before the actual air date. But it could take a while before this feature is released in a new version of ted.

For the short term, I think we should remove isoHunt. I think banning these trackers would cause more problems, since they can also be used for legimite torrents on other sites.

Firstly, let me say how awesome Ted is. Ted is definitely filling a crucial need in the process of replacing cable with an HTPC.

I'm a programmer, and while I don't know anything about the inner workings of Ted, let me suggest a solution that might be easier to implement. The issue here is that the bittorrent community does indeed filter out this spam eventually, but not until actual valid episodes are aired. Early on, even getting Ted to choose the torrent with the most seeders doesn't help, since the invalid episodes do have seeders. This problem is automatically fixed with time.

So what about this:

1. Ted checks shows normally every hour.
2. When Ted finds a new episode of a show, it stops without grabbing it and "locks" the show for some period, maybe 3-6 hours.
3. When the lock expires, then Ted re-checks for episodes and this time downloads the episode with the most seeders.

The user could override this behaviour by right-clicking on a show and manually asking Ted to download episodes.

Ideally the period above should be user-chooseable, but that's less important. These fakes are getting more common, and fast! A week or so ago I got maybe 1/10 episodes were fakes, last night it was 5/5 were fakes.

Hopefully this solution will be a simpler option than some of the other more complex ideas proposed, i.e. Ted trying to keep track of scheduled airtimes in specific timezones, etc. That's not necessary, just a pause from when the episode first appears on trackers should be a working fix.

Another possible solution that's been mentioned before:

We would have ted only download torrents that have been up-voted. Both btjunkie and isohunt include votes on their torrents. Isohunt even provides an nice JSON interface to access the information.

This could work with air-time checking to create a measure of how 'real' ted believes a torrent is, and then users could decide how low of a setting they'd like to risk downloading.

Most of the time I'm going to watch the show the next day, so a longer wait to ensure the torrent is real is completely acceptable.

Seems like a solution we could go for. There is only one thing I don't like about this approach and that is that you have to have a system in place for every feed/website which ted uses. isoHunt might be offering JSON but Mininova might use something else which we then also would need to support.

What also could be a problem is if (for example) a torrent is rejected on isoHunt because of the negative votes and that this same torrent is downloaded from Mininova because they don't have such a system in place.

True, true, good point. May have to put more thought into how to best classify torrents.

Hello All

The user has the ability to set their local time zone in the preferences.

I'm making an assumption that the TV show list is coming from mytvrss or something like that. Within the RSS feed is: <pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate>

Since TV for the US is keyed off EST (GMT -5) We know this show airs at 18:00 (6pm) EST. Any torrent posted before this time is flat out rejected and maybe anything posted before 19:00 is also rejected. An unscientific polling of the torrents on eztv shows me they post on average two hours after the airing.

Pseudo code:
Get pubDate from rss feed
Get UserPrefTimeZone from Preferences
Get torrentCreateDateTime from torrent file

If torrentCreateDateTime < (pubDate + UserPrefTimeZone)
REJECT
Else
Perform regular tests
size
not compressed etc...
End If

I would be willing to help code this solution.

Regards
Russ

I'm getting as many fakes as ever now unfortunately, with the same/similar fake torrents coming from btjunkie.

I don't have time this weekend to try to come up with a workaround, but I'm thinking that for myself if I can't mix the feeds to eliminate the fakes I may have to put ted on a really long update schedule, so that it always checks several hours after airtime? Any other suggestions would be great

thanks

I took btjunkie and isohunt out, and so far so good. Although, I'll know more next week, once the next round of new downloads occurs.

Three days (and about 10 torrents) in, and no fakes yet.

Isn't there a way to check the length of a video-file before downloading it?

Yeah so far I haven't had any fakes either after taking out both isohunt and btjunkie.

I don't have a lot of confidence in the longevity of this solution though ...

FYI, there are a few shows that air in canada the day before they air in the U.S., and I like it when I can see a show early.

I think I read that you want to break out the torrent sites from the show file, if not I think you should.

You already have the code to edit the torrents for each show we have, just use that when you break the torrents to their own file.

I don't mind if you control what torrent sites are in the file, but if I can control what order and which ones to use or not, then I'm happy.

In my opinion eztv is doing a great job filtering out the fakes.

I have set all my shows to zero file size, and zero feeders(40+ shows), and the only time I get fakes are when it get them from btjunkie, and I've been using those settings for over a year.

So I removed btjunkie from the show_cleanl file, and made eztv first and mininova second, and things are running fine.

I also think that you don't have to store the torrent sites for every show, just use the main file, with my preferences.

I still have not been able to get the sync working, so I had to edit all the shows by hand to sync mine. lol

I also think TED is becoming a STANDARD, and you might have the pull to set up the specs for what you want to see in the RSS feed.

So publish a spec of what you need to have, so ted works the best, and if the torrent sites don't want to provide those fields, then I know a ton of people who would gladly petition them on your behalf.

Thanksl

Just a note to Roel -- filtering based on air date and torrent avail date is probably not going to be robust enough. I think filtering on air date-time and torrent avail date-time is going to be necessary. I hope that's possible!

Hi,

Can someone advise how to take btjunkie and isohunt out on a Mac?

Thanks

Glenn.