I live in a dorm, where we are all on a network, and I like to share some stuff on my hard drive (i.e. music, porn, movies, and video clips). Now, I put comments in the folders that say “NO STREAMING” and yet people insist on doing it anyway. This really gets in the way of my Counter-Strike performance, and it seems my only options as of now are to unshare all my stuff before playing, or play laggy Counter-Strike.
So, my GQ is: is there some free software on the net that I can get to stop people from streaming, or some setting that I can turn on to stop it? Can I make it automatically boot them if they open any files off my computer, and still have them be able to download from me? Please help me dopers! I wouldn’t want to have to deprive my fellow students of my porn collection.
By “streaming,” you mean people play video and music files straight off your hard drive? The only solution I can think of is to run an anonymous FTP server or HTTP server (web server) on your PC. There should be a lot of freeware/shareware servers available. It may be more difficult for people to find your stuff though - maybe you could leave a text file explanation where your media files used to be.
Streaming or download, what the heck is the difference? either way they are pulling a file from your computer, one way, they get to watch it as they pull it. If yoy want to stop it, just zip the files up that they are streaming, then they have to download the file and unzip it, regardless, I see no difference.
If they are streaming, then they are sitting there playing it off of my computer for the duration of whatever it is, using up my processing power. If they are dowloading from me, they get can get the whole file in a matter of seconds, using a fraction of what they would use if they were playing it.
Don’t share the drive directly. Share it via a Gnutella client or whatever. The only way they can get it is to download it, then play it locally. You could also zip it all up, then they have to download it to unzip it but that would be less convenient to you.
The following assumes that you are referring to multimedia files shared by means of Microsoft networking. “Shared Folders”
I’m afraid you are technically inaccurate in your assertion that streaming abuses your machine’s CPU. “Streaming” your files over Microsoft networking uses the same quantity of processing time and bandwidth and works the same as flat-out downloading them.
This being said, if they use your shared disks to repeatedly download a file from as opposed to downloading it once, they are in fact using your bandwidth more times than strictly needed. One could not fault you for striving to prevent that. Do you believe that is what is actually happenning?