Some other WINMX "tip" files have circulated around for awhile, and some of them are very useful. WinMX has become a fantastic tool for me but only after I got all the skills down. There are too many frustrated people with incomplete downloads so I'm helping you all out with this handy-dandy compilation.
Before reading this, however, you should read the documentation and learn to use the software. You should be able to achieve a connection (be able to search), know the different windows (search, transfer, shared files, settings) and what information they contain and how to use them, how to deal with people (browse, whois, send messages chat). You should also know how to right-click, because WinMX's button layout is atrocious.
I'll be updating this regularly so check back. Planned is a nice HTML version, and the addition of lots of links to articles, forums and other further information.
*1* Set your expectations!!! ***************************************
WinMX is not a file server; not every download will work; in fact, expect to have 50% failure rate. You need to learn to use the software, learn effective strategies and get around people trying to screw it all up. But when you get good and wizened and wary and expect some disappointments... it's very very good.
The second thing is: you need to do research. When you start out you won't have the correct players, codecs, filters and so many of the files you get won't play (see the Software section). Don't give up and delete them! There are some great playback and ripping sites out there which have some useful guides or forums where you can ask questions; usually your problem has been experienced and solved by many other people.
- DON'T FOOL AROUND WITH SETTINGS YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. You can easily make winmx nonfunctional by doing this. If you find yourself becoming your own enemy, reset the defaults or reinstall winmx.
- FIND OUT YOUR ACTUAL CONNECTION SPEED in kilobytes/second for upstream (to the net) and downstream (to you). This will help you judge how well you're doing and how to set throttling. Consumer DSL is usually roughly 60KBs down / 30KBs up. Good cable modems are roughly 300KBs down and 60KBs up. You can take your ISP's specification in kilobits (Kb/s), divide by eight, then chop off about 25% for network overhead and real-world situations; that's your bandwidth in kilobits (KB/s).
- DON'T CHOKE YOUR BANDWIDTH - many people set their throttle speeds way too low. Throttling is necessary if you want to have control over how much certain people get who are downloading from you (ie, for trades), or wish to be polite to people you are sharing a network with. Most of the time it will work just fine (or better) with the throttles unchecked. Your OS and the network routers will ensure that everything gets what it needs.
- UPSTREAM BANDWIDTH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DOWNSTREAM BANDWIDTH. Many people still think that the more bandwidth they give to people downloading from them, the less they have for themselves. No! They are seperate channels in all cases including dialups, DSL, LANs and cable modems, so cutting down people's downloads won't help you in the least. Just don't think that; if you can't help it, try hitting yourself with a brick.
- THROTTLE PROCESS INTERVAL - in theory, the shorter the interval the more corrections WINMX can make to maintain the bandwidth limits and priorities you've set. Normally this should make very little difference. However, I've seen wild bandwidth fluctuations for people uploading when this is too high (I keep mine at 150ms). If you have a slow CPU (<400mhz), having this process fire more frequently can noticably nibble away at your cpu cycles.
- USE A PRIMARY CONNECTION - it's much more effective. Firewalls are the biggest impediment to this; winmx needs to be able to accept traffic and requests on 2 ports (1 for TCP, and one for UDP). If you don't have either, you're not going to be able to share and people aren't going to want to share with you. Consult your network admin, firewall manual or local geek.
- PRIMARY CONNECTION ADVANCED SETTINGS - i *believe* this deals with winmx control resources used by gathering search results, negotiating connections, etc. If you're doing lots of searches or have MANY queued files that WINMX needs to constantly communicate with other hosts, then raising this will probably benefit you. (notice how slowly other peoples' file lists download when you browse them).
- GO FOR POPULAR FILES. This way, WINMX can constantly grab from multiple sources around the clock. With broadband you should be able to get a full movie in 12-24 hours.
- MAKE WINMX DO ALL THE WORK. In your transfers window, set each file to "Auto-find sources: every 10 Minutes" and "Auto Enter Queue: 100". So, every 10 minutes winmx will check for new sources and get in line up to spot 100. This is much better than you wrestling with WINMX and with people about trading. **TRY THIS IT'S VERY POWERFUL** You can prioritize this way, too.
- JUST GET IN LINE - like in any form of communism, you need to get in line early and be prepared to wait a long time. However, be optimistic because like in any long line, it moves ahead at a good pace due to people passing out ahead of you. So, being 109th in line isn't necessarily so bad, but it's obviously better to be 1st in line. Think about when people get online to download stuff and do repeated searches then (weekend late mornings, weekday mornings, weekday after work hours).
- MAX POSSIBLE DOWNLOADS - set this all the way up, if you can handle the excitement. This is one cause of "(queued locally)" download statuses (and "busy" hosts).
- tip: periodically and after queuing downloads, check your transfers window. If you see "(queued locally)" select that source and do "start transfer" - it will become "(busy)". When you see "(busy)" do "enter remote queue". I've never understood what the heck "busy" means. Is it washing its hair?
- SHARE YOUR FILES! When people with good files see you downloading but you're not sharing files yourself, you're libel to get kicked out or ignored. This is the way it should be to keep this alive. Don't have any files? Grab some ripping software and learn to us it. (see software section)
- VERIFY YOUR FILES BEFORE SHARING THEM. There's tons of misnamed files on the web, as well as files of terrible quality. Don't share your winmx\incoming directory.
- TRADING. It's a good way to get complete files, and sometimes the ONLY way to get obscure ones. Just ask someone you're downloading from if you have anything they want. Use the bandwidth priority in the downloads window to give them a good chunk of bandwidth. (10-20KB/s is reasonable) and they'll return the favour. Weekday evenings and weekend afternoons are the best times to trade.
- PRIORITIZE PEOPLE WHO SHARE. People who don't share are useless to the network. You want to share files with people who will share them with others, especially if they're obscure and hard to find.
- HELP THEM HURRY UP. If you see someone who's almost finished downloading your file, give them some extra bandwidth and help them complete. Don't disconnect people (or disconnect, yourself) when they're almost done. An incomplete download is worthless.
- PICK A REASONABLE # OF SLOTS FOR DOWNLOADERS. It's better to offer a small number of download slots (or rather, "max total uploads") with higher bandwidth; it leads to more completed downloads for people. I do 2 users, in case one person is slow. Also, limit each user to 1 download at a time. Be fair. (sorry about the confusion between "upload" and "download". Technically, everyone is downloading... but what they're downloading you're uploading to them. Get it?)
- WHY ISN'T ANYONE DOWNLOADING?? - if you have good files and noone's downloading, you either must reconfigure your "shared files" directories, or deal with a firewall issue.
- RUN WINMX 24x7. You need to let WINMX run for long periods of time, at least if you want huge files. WINMX needs to build a list of who else is out there, and the more people you can see the more you can download from. Plus, it takes time to download little pieces from many people. I generally go for 7 days and reboot once a week, and take that opportunity for weekly maintenance.
- Search for something REALLY popular (like the letter "e") before you do your obscure searches... this way winmx can get a jump start on its host list (i read this somewhere else).
- You can speed up downloads by constantly re-searching and manually adding new sources for the same file. WINMX can be set up to be pretty aggressive about getting stuff but doing this yourself (in addition to WINMX) will give you that extra competetive edge. Note that green search results means your already downloading them; but if there's multiple sources, expand the sublist (the "+") and you may see black files, which are untapped sources... go get em!
Sources for the same file will be a green expandable line. Once you expand it, the green sourcs will be who you're already downloading from, black are untapped sources. Queue up all the black ones; they'll go green, then black again; wait for this and queue them again and they should stick. Or, once you have a file downloading, just do "search for alternatives" and queue everything you see.
- Ignore connection speed, queue place, etc. There's no way to tell what how a download will go, unless you know that particular person.
- Watch for warnings from other people in the filename, (ie, "STAR TREK NEMESIS.AVI <<-- THIS IS TELETUBBIES YOU IDIOTS!!.AVI").
- Look for different instances of the same filename with different file sizes. Probably, there was a valid original file that "they" used to rename lots of files with but you're going to have to try a few to find it.
- Try searching first on sharereactor.com for rip reviews and look for files with those sizes on winmx. (they are for eDonkey2000 and Overnet clients). Those are usually excellent rips and make their way to winmx pretty quickly. You can try those clients, they're good, but winmx is larger and much more powerful.
*6* Dealing with Misnamed Files and Other Seething Evil ************
- SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES! This is someone else's tip and it works well. When you first download a selection, flip over to your transfers window and do "search for alternatives" on it. If it's a popular file, you'll get lots of sources and each source's filename. Look for alot of people who have the complete file and the same filename (they've probably looked at it an not deleted it)... is this what you wanted? Is sex with animals your thing? It might be.
- VERIFY YOUR FILES BEFORE SHARING THEM. Unshare your winmx\incoming directory. You don't have to download the whole file to check its validity. While it's downloading, copy the "INCOMPLETE" file and play that. Resharing bad files is a nuisance to everyone, and makes it easy for saboteurs and pinheads to distribute them.
(note: Some files, like AVIs, can't be played with regular
players if they're incomplete. There is software available
which can do this well enough to make some judgement about
it. It is freely available.)
- WARN OTHERS. Tell people the file they're downloading is fake. You can also re-share this file with a warning in the filename that others will see when they search.
- There's been alot of file corruption lately. One thing that has worked on occasion is: When you see a bunch of "file mismatch errors" but you're downloading consistently okay from one source, try downloading the entire thing again without the "good" source. See, if you're downloading from a corrupted source, everyone else's file will be wrong. Perhaps they'll add a feature in winmx to get a consensus from available sources on data integrity.
*7* System issues ***************************************************
- CONSIDER TWEAKING OS NETWORK SETTINGS - While dangerous for the newbie, these can make a noticable (but not huge) difference. Older operating systems are tuned for dialup connections, and consumer operating systems generally don't have the same tuning as server OS's... but that doesn't stop you from tuning your box as a fast server. Look online for windows network optimizing utilities, registry tweaks, etc. SysInternals.com has several neat performance tools, especially "frob".
- WATCH YOUR CPU METER - You can get a preliminary idea from the task manager (NT, XP, 2000) what's chewing into your CPU cycles. When you hit maximum, connections can't get serviced and they start to time out and drop. I'm using an 4-year-old computer and with careful tuning I'm able to run several P2P apps at once (all on different networks) with about 20-30 concurrent transfers.
- DO REGULAR MAINTENANCE - I strongly recommend running winmx 24x7 for maximum benefit. However, realize that there are issues with doing this, including your electric bill and wear and tear on your system, especially your hard drives. Your disks will get fragmented Very quickly and they will have to work harder. Defragment! Scan your drives for errors! Reboot! And for god's back up your archive; if you tax a [consumer] hard disk constantly for a year it is bound to fail and you will lose everything.
- AUDIO - winamp. (I've never needed anything else)
- VIDEO - first, search for and download "nimo codec pack"; this should have all the decoders you need. Some good players include bsplay/bsplayer and radlight. I'm not a fan of Windows Media Player because it tells microsoft what you're watching, it's doing unknown DRM things and there aren't enough settings to get stuff to look right. I've heard good things about video quality in ATI's and nVidia's players.
- CODECS - (coder/decoder) I recommend "Nimo Codec Pack" which is pretty comprehensive, but if it's Nimbo Version 5 Build 8 DO NOT install the included "ffdshow" which causes XVID problems (installation will allow you to find and unselect this component). Instead, get ffdshow build date 6/17/02 or later; they are on sourceforge.com. There is also "Ace Codec Pack" but I haven't used it.
- TV OUTPUT - Newer, high-end television sets have DVI or VGA inputs... this is excellent but you need to program custom video modes (generally). Look at "Powerstrip" for this. Also, some folks with regular s-video or composite TV-out ports have trouble with colors and weird borders or scaling effects; try "TVtool".
- RIPPING TOOLS - I would go to ripping sites like www.digital-digest.com (and many others) and read
about it, because you can't just download software and expect it to have decent results. Search on google and read about this stuff: EAC (exact audio copy), Ogg Vorbis, Divx, Xvid, 3vix, Xmpeg, Gordion Knot, Flask mpeg, Vidomi, DRM (digital rights management), CSS / DeCSS.
- SECURITY
+ NETWORK FIREWALLS are generally hardware. There's a million companies that make affordable ones including Linksys, Netgear, Macsense, Belkin, SOHOware. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND USING ONE.
Quality is one of the biggest problems with P2P, especially if you think you're some kind of connoiseur. The quality of ripped/recompressed files are never as good as the storebought CDs and DVDs. This is very apparent when you compare them on good, high fidelity / high definition equipment.
Many rips out there suck or are inordinately huge and it just annoys me that people can't get it right... It's Not That Difficult, folks, but you need to know what you're doing and have a sense of quality. A high resolution video is definitely nice (ie, 640x352) but it's also incredibly important for it to be sharp; the sharper it is, the easier time the scaling algorithms will have maintaining that sharpness when resizing it to some given monitor's resolution. Also, many people seem to think that higher bitrate and larger size gives better quality; this isn't necessarily the case. I've seen a billion 128kbs mp3's that are better than 320kbs ones, and 2-gig movies that aren't as good as 800mb ones.
So, please PLEASE do research online and understand what you're doing. Have a critical, discerning eye/ear for quality. It does not require a PhD in computer science. Also, when you reshare files you've downloaded, add any notes about quality to the filename.
*10* Be Careful, Stupid! ********************************************
Most of what goes on here is illegal. Do not forget that if any of us ever end up in court for this, it will be treated the same as shoplifting (how many ripped CDs and DVDs do you have?) or selling stolen goods (you're trading, aren't you?). Companies have been known to contact ISPs and get them through legal pressure to release your name and address and the ISPs don't have to tell you about it. Then, they may send you a cease-and-desist notice and possibly press charges. They are scouring the networks and compiling lists of people whom they can dig their teeth into as soon as it becomes safe public policy for them. And, media companies, paid saboteurs and Concerned Citizens are actively trying to interrupt and hack into P2P networks.
So:
- don't attract too much attention to yourself
- routinely change your name and reset your IP address
- try rotating your collection (or share only the most rare, hard to get items)
- use good security practices (see software section)
- read relevant news and stay abreast of what's going on
*APPENDIX A* A Short Manifesto on P2P ******************************
No matter how you cut it, when you steal or distribute other people's property you are hurting them. However with CDs and DVDs the people you are PRIMARILY hurting are the middlemen. These are the slimey dealmakers and marketeers who decide that you ought to pay $25-$60 for a DVD which costs $1 to make, $3 to license and $56 to market and distribute.
I think that because of the internet, the traditional distribution channels are becoming more and more irrelevant; look at the boom in online stores and electronic software distribution as an example. Nonetheless, they want to keep you in those channels for no other reason than their own survival. Granted, alot of good honest hardworking people work for these companies, but these companies are irrelevant, sapping our money and doing damage to our legal system with all these crazy bribes and laws to protect their way of doing business. I say, unless they can evolve and embrace the situation in some productive way, they should become obsolete and extinct in the normal capitalistic way.
Now about the people creating this stuff. Keep in mind that artists get very little IF ANYTHING from CD sales. Usually the artist is charged for making and marketing the CD, thus they shoulder the risk and not the company. So, artists could care less about P2P, because they make all their money from concerts and merchandise. Movie companies are more complicated because of all the people involved, but what's similarly objectionable is that the people at the top (executives, directors, actors) negotiate huge salary and royalty deals while the people doing production work don't make that much at all and definitely don't get royalties from aftermarket sales.
Are you justified in stealing stuff? Probably not. Is the cost of the middlemen justified? Probably not either. Do I have any black and white philosophical conclusions? Probably not! However, I do have some machiavellian proposals.
This current system DOES need to change; we're tossing our money not to the hardworking artists, but to manevolent, useless, self-serving companies. These companies have no respect for us, nor for the artists, nor for our government; they just want as much money as they can get from us. If we want to battle their price fixing, manipulation of our legal system, intrusive marketing, slimey business practices and Bad Dollar Value we need to do something. This P2P thing, while ethically and legally dubious, has at least scared these companies. We should maintain this leverage and force them to restructure their business. But to follow through on this we need to fight back against people who seek to destroy it, including paid saboteurs, purchased senators, the angrily righteous and the ambivalent. Get involved and go DO SOMETHING.
When they learn to respect the artist and the consumer, and provide a price and value to us that is attractively better than the tediousness and illegality of P2P, then we will simply and naturally buy from them again. After all, CDs and DVDs are worth purchasing and they're always superior to the free stuff.
