We have talked a few times about it within AMP, mainly wanting to move away from blogspot. Blogspot is under the care of Google which is good as they don't tend to care much about the content, but not totally immune to DMCA, which we've experience in the past with shows from Enta371&Pigoo.
We have two different things to consider: distribution and storage.
About distribution:
- Blogspot is a good distribution medium as it's very public and hosted but you have no immediate control over who can see the content (as in IP blocking for example).
- The Idoling!!! multimedia forum is a good alternative, it requires registration and some forum activity, but it is practically unknown to probably half of the downloaders and all the japanese, and I don't really want to completely shut them off either.
- Using PM's is too much of a hassle I think, you might as well post it in the multimedia section.
- An option we've been considering is using the J-Enta website which I've made myself, and put download links behind a registration barrier. This might be less public but everyone can register and then view the download links (just like this forum), BUT I have full control if anything happens. Reading about the IP blocking suggestion, I could use that in a different way. Non-japanese IP address can see the download links immediately (since they cannot watch FOD legally anyway, and practically impossible now with the latest FOD update on April 1st), and all japanese IP addresses get a 2 week delay (since they can watch FOD legally). They probably won't even notice the delay and I have no problem announcing it on AMP that they need to register on J-Enta for download links. Which is already the case for a while now, all download links can already be found on there, you just need to register. And J-Enta's main emphasis was to be an information database and a bit of a community (I have ideas to make it possible to add & update content like anidb.net), you can already comment, rate and mark an episode as seen to manage your watched episodes.
And btw, I feel bad about it myself having to delay 2 weeks.
Now about storage: Mediafire has always been a very good file host (no limit & good speed) and amount uploaded by Silverbolt & me is quite extensive, I'm sure it approaches 800 GB in total. About the local backup someones mentioned, me and SB still have every file uploaded, so that's not a problem.
The problem will indeed be when Mediafire ever goes bust.
- Torrents have one problem, they need seeders. If we were to try torrents, I'd say to do it in larger packs of 50 episodes or something, having fewer torrents is easier to maintain than a torrent for each individual episode.
- MS SkyDrive, haven't looked into that, but you might indeed have the same advantage as Google with Blogspot, caring less about the content. But a 25GB limit? We'd hit that in a few months if we'd only upload new stuff.
- Any other file hosting (including SkyDrive) will require uploading everything again, splitting it all in rar files again, and uploading everything, while torrents can group several files together.
- Using a private paid hosting makes you much more directly vulnerable than a file hoster.
- Using someone's private internet connection with an FTP server connected to a NAS; I have a good upload speed and unlimited data, but I don't think that's a good option, one ip lookup and you can easily report that.
- Using XDCC on IRC is basically the same thing as the FTP server, although getting the files is more obscure to the outside world.
- Isn't Usenet dying lately or is it still going strong? The problem is indeed that it's not free to get decent speed.
I think that using a different cyberlocker when mediafire goes bust would be a good alternative to get new episodes out, but not as a permanent storage. For archival purposes of older stuff, I'd go for big torrent packs, every torrent client can easily be set up to only download 1 single file of the pack. And someone has actually done that on helloonline, but the older torrents lack seeders. But for the time being, mediafire is still resisting.
Topic: The Idoling!!! Discussion Thread (Read 762815 times)