divxsource.com needs some help!

[wa22guy]

http://www.divxsource.com is looking for volunteers to help with the new site launch! It will be a site with downloads, articles, links, forums and more, all on DivX and related codecs.

Here's the deal. We need help. The main areas I am looking for help are:

Design - Overall web page design. Please include some demo work. - design@divxsource.com

Graphics - A logo and graphics theme. - graphics@divxsource.com

Forum Moderators - I need about 2 or 3 moderators to start. After a while I'm sure demand will pick up. - mods@divxsource.com

Language Translastions - Translate word for word for our foriegn sites. Weekly job. - lang@divxsource.com

If you wish to apply, please send any demo work to the e-mail address specified above. Please do not apply by responding to this e-mail. You will be notified if you get chosen. Thanks.

_________________
wa22guy - Ethan
divx.com Moderator - Newbie's Forum

[-h]

Good luck with the site and all, but I dare say linking to Doom9's files (i.e. DivxFix) is still a no-no ;)

-h

[wa22guy]

Don't worry, it's just in the mean-time until things are all put together. I'm sure he won't mind getting a few extra hits to his site while mine is in limbo.

[int 21h]

Originally posted by wa22guy
Don't worry, it's just in the mean-time until things are all put together. I'm sure he won't mind getting a few extra hits to his site while mine is in limbo.

No, I'm completely sure he will mind. Redirecting someone to his software page is one thing, linking directly to the software is another.

[Doom9]

in fact I do mind very much.. due to excessive leeching, site ripping and link stealing plus the additional bandwith usage due to the new codec comparision my actual bandwith usage, if calculated for a month with the current numbers is more than 900gigs.. that's way more than the average. Just recently I had a server cancelled after only 3 weeks of operation, this week-end I got a new one which already was removed from the round robin because after 21gigs in less than 48h they pulled the plug... and one of the two servers still operational is limited by it's connection.. the T1 it's on is saturated almost 99%.

I'm afraid I will have to make very drastic changes to cut down the bandwith usage.. (among other things that means reworking all pages and images which is a huge job, but also cutting down on software downloads.. and I have my webmasters looking into referrer checking and limiting the number of simultaneous downloads).

if my site will ever have to go down for other reasons than me not wanting to do it anymore it will most likely not be for legal reasons but for bandwith reasons. I will have to focus more on just writing guides and news and not being so much of a download site anymore.

[tenebrenz]

That is quite severe. Thinking about it, I think it might be a good idea to not have any direct links to the software on the main news page as it is far too easy to download programs whether one really needs them or not. It is far too easy to click and let getright do its business.
Recently I have dowloaded soft (decomb for instance) and before I have found the time to test it another version is availble, etc, all resulting in wasted bandwidth.
I think it would be a good idea if the news page only contained links to the programs author's site (something to be encouraged) and for downloads from your site you have to look on another page.

I'm sure you have thoght of all this before but it is my 2 cents.

[Doom9]

this is one of the things I'm working on right now.. I just optimized 223html pages manually.. next stop are the images and then I'll try a html compressor that makes my html unreadable (but removes line breaks and other stuff you don't need unless you manually edit).. and there's a lot more coming... but that's only going to make a few gigs difference.. the main thing here is user behavior.. I hope that I can eventually implement referrer checking and a limit of simultaneous download plus a way to prevent site loader tools to work

[wa22guy]

Ok sorry about that, I will take it down and host the link myself.

[wa22guy]

Ok done. It's fixed. Sorry about that guys.

[omol]

Originally posted by Doom9
this is one of the things I'm working on right now.. I just optimized 223html pages manually.. next stop are the images and then I'll try a html compressor that makes my html unreadable (but removes line breaks and other stuff you don't need unless you manually edit).. and there's a lot more coming... but that's only going to make a few gigs difference.. the main thing here is user behavior.. I hope that I can eventually implement referrer checking and a limit of simultaneous download plus a way to prevent site loader tools to work

Doom, try mod_throttle/bwshare and mod_gzip first before major overhaul of all html to include referrer check. These will do wonder. All available in apache module repository.

regards,
omol

[Doom9]

the problem is.. I don't have direct access to the servers except for ftp.. and not all the servers run apache, either. we tried mod_throttle on the apache server but the results weren't good so now all files are on a non browsable ftp that has a connection limit. I've studied the mod_throttle documentation and made some suggestions to my apache webmaster but he never answered that mail and I haven't heard from him in a while.

and then again.. I have an IIS hosting that's pretty much guaranteed to work and where nobody will pull the plug and I won't just dump 300 free gigs a month.. would be very hard to find a replacement.

And, for apache referrer checking doesn't seem that hard.. all you gotta do is include a few lines into the apache config.. but once again.. if I don't have direct access I have to rely on the admins doing it.. changing links, reducing the software archive and generally optimizing the page is what I can and will do (in fact I'm more than 50% done already... once again a day off without any free time :(

[ChristianHJW]

I know i'm not going to make me any friends, but as i stated here http://www.powerdivx.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=199 :

I posted him today if i were him i would start to charge money for the downloads. Its just so easy, you cant find the proggie you d'led last week .... oh simply do it again, its free !!

It's not free ! Nothing is free ! My idea was like every user could fill up a 'download account' by making a donation via paypall or similar, like 5 € and then every download is 50 € Cents ..... 1/5 are for the coders.

Call my idea stupid, but i dont see another way for our friend Doom9 to keep his site alive .... his traffic is like that of a professional website and you simply dont get this for free in the internet world ! Why not try to cover the costs with a download fee ?

I would start to charge money for the downloads ! Keep the forums free, and the Guides. But ask people to come up for the costs of the downloads .... feel free to flame me here, i can stand that.

[int 21h]

Why would anyone in their right mind pay for the downloads? 90% of the downloads are GPL code products available all over, and the other 10% are personal projects available from the author (VobSub, VirtualDub, etc)

[int 21h]

I think that a more viable solution would be to rethink how things are done now. Obviously if you recompressed all of the available files with RAR on Max Compression, that would save some space. Heck, ask in the correct places, you may even be able to setup an anonymous FTP for download, or, you could setup a complete FTP solution, monitor usage, and get rid of trouble users (i.e. people that use alot of bandwidth), not only would this eliminate leechers of links, but it would allow you to manage the situation a little more effectively.

Obviously, solving this problem is going to take more than one measure, and perhaps some more work.

Also, a referer check can be simply implemented via CGI.

[ivan_alias]

How about getting people to use P2P apps for downloads?

If all the apps and rips packs were on morpheus it would be really easy to reduce the bandwidth from the site.

Even perhaps a custom Doom9 p2p app?

Just a thought...

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by int 21h Why would anyone in their right mind pay for the downloads?

Simply to cover the costs the download is causing .... a GPL soft may be free, but downloading it will produce costs and they cant be paid by Doom9 any longer, the traffic is simply too high.

I'd be glad if somebody came up with a better solution, because frankly speaking i myself like the ease of donwloading soft like GKnot or BeSweet free of cost, but somebody has to cover the resulting costs for that .... at least i can say i donated some 10 or 20 US$ ( cant remember ) last year .... if all members would do so we wouldnt have this problem.

[Doom9]

well.. I've tried pretty much everything I can do from my side now (recompressing some fils is still an option.. but if you know how many people don't know what a rar file is.. plus ace actually compresses better but almost nobody can open these things without downloading another app... this includes me)

but I don't like the idea of making people pay... even though I do think that many simply don't get that there's no free lunch on this planet...

@int21h: what are the correct places?

from here on there won't be any direct download links in the news anymore.. just links to the respective homepages.. in some cases all the links are external (though only to a download page.. no direct links unless I got permission... I know other people pay for bandwith, too), sometimes the guide still links to local files. I manually tuned each gfx file (600+), each html file (400+) and ran the whole html code thru a html compressor after the hand optimization.. now nobody can read it in a text editor but it's smaller. I'm probably also going to split up the news... only keep 10 days or so on the frontpage (this month even with the html compressor the news file is still 33k large).. but all the html and image compression is not really going to cut it... it may lower bandwith usage by roughly 10gigs a month but that's still nothing compared to the rest. GKnot downloads amount to almost 100gigs along.. and dvd2svcd comes in second with maybe 60-70gigs (it's hard to give exact numbers as I had a 3rd server for a couple of weeks and no stats on that one..).

[Doom9]

umm.. so I rared up both the gknot installer and dvd2svcd installer. result: a 27 respecively 45kb gain in filesize so that is not going to make much of a difference.. I also tried vcdimager and tscv.. there it was a little more, at least in the x00k range

[MxxCon]

no way in hell will CAB compress better than rar.
read http://compression.ca

edit: hrm...did my msg apeared above -h when it was reply to his:confused:

[diji1]

At the risk of getting *really* flamed, have you considered advertising ?? You seem to generate a lot of traffic, no ?? Before anyone lays onto me i'll just say i'd rather use a site containg advertising than no site at all :\

edit: edit: hrm...did my msg apeared above -h when it was reply to his

Yep, seems to be stuck at the bottom, how strange...

[-h]

@Doom9:

You might want to try using CAB instead - cab files are supported in Windows itself, so you don't even need Winzip or anything, and it should compress a bit better than rar too.

The easiest (free) tool is at http://www.helesic.cz/en/helecabcompresor.php - just set it to use LZX compression in "Super (21)" mode.

-h

[-h]

compression.ca is.. well.. out of date :)

Plus the tests didn't use the file extension sorting that HeleCAB does. RAR does sometimes best CAB, but for me it's only in 5% of cases (where its multimedia compression comes into play).

Look at TMPGEnc 2.01 + VFAPI:

ZIP = 1.27 MB
RAR = 1.09 MB
CAB = 841 KB

CAB wins because its dictionary is 2.1 MB, versus RAR's 1 MB. Oh and just looking at the old tests on compression.ca... CAB is beating RAR in the executable and text tests, to name just two ;)

-h

[Xanthis]

I know that you setup the servers so that each server get's it share of hits, but perhaps setting up one dedicated in which you can have the admin setup Mod Gzip Apache module. Most ppl should be browsing with the latest browsers anyway and most of them will have the capability to accept gzip content.

I run a co-branded board site (mycool.com) with just over a thousand communities. Last month's bandwidth usage reached only 2.2 gigs, and this was the server's bandwidth which also hosted various other sites and huge Turkish community site. In fact I moved my site which had 6 gigs of HTML transfer a month avg over to this dedicated machine, and all I allocated was 2.2 gigs over the entire server.

I also believe it compresses images, so it's pretty much compressed as it is, but most HTML can be compressed from 30k down to like 9k, especially since most of them are just text. The visitors will also an increase in speed as the server is transfering data as gzip content, so the file size is much lower. The client's browser extracts the data. The module will detect and serve the correct content if the browser can't handle it.

I also use PNG which gives me sometimes a better compression than JPG or GIF. I haven't used it on true 24-bit color images, but works great for small icons. Might want to try it and see how that works out. . .

If you a bit skeptical on the amount of compression you can gain from these guides, you can use this tool as a guage to see how much compression you could get.

http://leknor.com/code/gziped.php

--
http://flaap.com <- Flash & PHP resources
http://www.mycool.com <- Co-branded BBS

[Doom9]

there's just a tiny problem with mod_gzip... 2 of the currently 3 servers I use use IIS

[MxxCon]

well, according to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255951
IIS5 natively support gzip
iis4 article seem to be down..but i guess it support gzip also

[Doom9]

thanks for the link.. I'll try to have it installed asap

[Doom9]

is it me? forum is much faster now.. guess what.. I turned on mod_gzip, compression setting 2. Now I'm wondering.. what setting is best? I'll keep bugging my hosts to set up the same immediately, it may not make much of a difference bandwith wise but it's nice to know the page loads faster

[omol]

Originally posted by Doom9
is it me? forum is much faster now.. guess what.. I turned on mod_gzip, compression setting 2. Now I'm wondering.. what setting is best? I'll keep bugging my hosts to set up the same immediately, it may not make much of a difference bandwith wise but it's nice to know the page loads faster

It depends on how much cpu power the server has. Gzip is reasonably fast, but I wouldn't use the max setting. For the IIS's mod_gzip equivalent, if I recall correctly, there used to be one. Also by the same developer of mod_gzip, by the Remote Communications (http://www.remotecommunications.com/). However, the co change hand and there's no information on the new owner website where to find the it.

regards,
omol

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Doom9 is it me? forum is much faster now..

.. from my stomach-o-meter i would say factor 2 - 4 ..... well done !

[FactorM]

The board is really fast loading now, nice :)

[Doom9]

and all I did was throwing a switch. I make sure I get the same for my site servers. But I still have to work on cutting down the bandwith usage.. the T1 still peaked yesterday and I didn't get the mirror I was supposed to get

[wa22guy]

Just letting you all know that www.divxsource.com is currently giving 25% of all it's donations to United Way.

Ethan
divx.com Moderator
divxsource.com Owner

[Emp3r0r]

Doom9: I know your hosting of software is a feature of your site but I'm willing to live with going to the Software's Homepage to download the software. Did you ever consider offering like
Download: Link 1
Link 2

Where link 1 would goto authors site and link 2 would point at your servers? You should have the link to the software's site linked before you link the actual download. I'd rather read the software homepage before downloading the software anyway. Just my 2 cents.