Winny Guide
index : intro/resources : setup : usage : tips
Last updated: 2004-06-21
This page lists random things which I find useful or interesting.
- Adding download rules
- Adding ignore rules
- Show header block
- Force conversion
Cache management
How to upload less
How to increase download limit
- Headless Winny
- Share more of your cache!
- Clusters
1. Adding download rules will make Winny more automated, so that you don't have to babysit it (although in some cases, using Winny semi-interactively is better).
- Selecting the right keywords will greatly improve chances of getting the right files. Including the episode title is usually a good idea, including the series title is always a good idea. Sometimes you can add the media type to keywords for further constraints.
- Including a known trip will ensure you get real files of consistent quality. Knowing which trips to include depends on experience, you will need to make note of the trips where the files come from everytime you download something that has trip information attached.
- Setting a hash will make other fields redundant -- you already know exactly what file you want in this case (either from a hashlist downloaded elsewhere, or your Winny friends has already found the files).
- When not specifying trips or hashes, always specify a nonzero size range. Guessing the right size range will ensure getting files in the right media type. Setting a nonzero upper bound makes you less prune to disk overflows. Setting a nonzero lower bound will exclude most advertisements (which are usually small but contains popular keywords in their file names, thus are likely to be found).
2. Adding ignore rules prevents Winny from collecting garbage files. The matching system works the exact same way as the download rules, except the effect is the opposite.
- Winny works best when used semi-interactively. To find particular files you want, you can poll the search results regularly by clicking on the search tabs, or better yet -- add a generous download rule, then as Winny tries to download these files, add ignore rules for the files you don't want, then cancel the download.
- To not download the files you already have, compute the MD5s of the files you have on disk, then add them to ignore rules.
3. Show header block is the one best method for verifying files before downloading the whole thing. Of course, it requires some understanding of the file format.
- Most files have "magic numbers" near beginning of file, which you can look up in /etc/mime.magic (linux) or /usr/share/file/magic.mime (cygwin). The most common ones or "RAR" (RAR archive), "PK" (PKzip archive).
- For AVI files, the magic is "RIFF", and you can get the width/height at offsets 0x40 and 0x44 (little-endian order). For example, 640x480 video would have these bytes at 0x40: 80 02 00 00 e0 01 00 00 (0x280 = 640, 0x1e0 = 480).
- Magic for Windows executables is "MZ". You usually don't want to download any executables through any peer-to-peer software, as they are more likely to be viruses than anything else.
4. You can force conversion on partially downloaded files. Winny will mark these files as incomplete in the downloaded folder, and you see red text in the task view.
- For the most part, this function is superseded by the show header block function. And for most files (most video files included), an incomplete file is useless.
- However, for archive files such as RAR and ZIP, a partial file is enough to be useful, and you can examine the content more closely than just seeing the first header block. RAR has a "repair" option ("rar r archive", though usually you can extract from broken archives anyways), as does ZIP that's packaged with cygwin ("zip -F archive", usually you would simply truncate it up to the last useful chunk with "zip -qF archive").
5. This section has been removed, please read my apology.
6. This section has been removed, please read my apology.
7. This section has been removed, please read my apology.
8. For those not able to see the menus/buttons (and you already tried changing the international settings from Control Panel and that didn't work), Winny can be used in headless mode. This is not an official feature, it's a hack ^_^;
- Winny's behavior can be controlled entirely from configuration files, which are in plain text, Shift-JIS encoding.
- First you will need to get Winny to run, for that you will need a valid configuration file and a node list. You can run Winny once to generate the Winny.ini, and use my Noderef.txt.
- Inside Winny.ini, you will find lines with AcceptPort=number and BbsAcceptPort=number. Those TCP ports will need to be forwarded on your firewall or router, if you are not connected directly to the internet.
- Before starting Winny, you will need to edit Download.txt to get the files you want. The easiest way to do this is to get someone else to search the files for you, and send you a Download.txt.
- Alternatively, you can find MD5sum of the desired file somewhere, and create Download.txt yourself. Download board at 2ch usually have a few threads listing hash values.
- Lines are in this format: keywords,trip,lowerbound,upperbound,hash,1
- keywords: Search keywords for pattern matching. This is ignored if you specify the file hash.
- trip: Constraint to files from this source only.
- lowerbound: Minimum size of file in MB.
- upperbound: Maximum size of file in MB.
- hash: MD5 of file you are looking for.
- The last 1 tells Winny to remove this rule once the download is complete.
- For example, to download file with MD5 of 175b7d620a0f0beea281fdc4aae9c950, the line might look like: haibane,,0,0,175b7d620a0f0beea281fdc4aae9c950,1
- Here is a download.txt that will download hash lists (and any file that looks like it), as well as the above example. Once you get a hash of the file you want, edit download.txt and add the file you want.
- After Winny is running, you can wait and hope that your files can be found. If Winny is working, your cache directory should grow. Once a download is complete, the file will be placed in the downloaded directory (default name is "Down").
9. This isn't just to be social...
- The more files you have in your cache, the more search hits you get in return. I have tested this empirically (but don't have hard numbers to prove it).
- If you upload more files, Winny will automatically increase your download limit (from the 2 connection limit). The upload/connection table was on the Winny Tips Page, copied here:
- Send 0 - 40: Up 2, Down 2
- Send 40 - 80: Up 2, Down 3
- Send 80 - 160: Up 3, Down 4
- Send 160 - 240: Up 4, Down 5
- Send 240 - 320: Up 5, Down 6
- Over 320: connection limit error
Simply not deleting files from your cache after the download completed is the best way. In this sense, Winny is very much like BitTorrent.
To upload files that you didn't download, you will need to register an upload folder with Winny. There is a bug in 2.0beta7.1 that causes Winny to crash when adding an upload folder, so you will need to create the UpFolder.txt manually:
[foldername]
Path=c:\folder\location
Trip=
Winny has bandwidth accounting problems, from time to time it will report bandwidth use much higher than what the connection is capable of (during burst transfers especially, it seems). My record is 102K ^_^;
10. Joining clusters to get more search results... really is quite a black art. Basically you want to be in the group of nodes who are searching for the same things as yourself.
To do this, add a download rule with the keywords specifying what you are looking for, and press [use settings for cluster] button. The first three rules will be used as your cluster keywords, marked with "*".
The cluster keywords themselves aren't always obvious, sometimes searching for "anime" or "comic" will do it, but more obscure keywords sometimes return more hits (and this is the black art bit). One way to guess the popular cluster keywords is to observe the node list screen.
Also, remember that you get more hits in return if you have more files in your cache.
index : intro/resources : setup : usage : tips