and started wondering what the biggest publicly available file on the Web is. Anyone out there that can top 128 MB? Raw meteorological data gets high (I found one that was nearly 70 MB) and I thought genetic sequences could also be huge (though I figured most of that data was non-public).
Restrictions:
totally public: no registration (even free), etc., required to download
The Baldur’s Gate II demo is by far the largest file I’ve downloaded. It came in seven parts totaling ~650 MB. It was hosted on FilePlanet, which used to be registration free but now requires it.
The Gothic demos (German and English) weigh in at 284 MB each. Here is the English version.
has a whole bunch of large movies, especially the ones in MPEG2 format. The largest I saw in a really quick look was ~600MB, but there may be some larger ones.
Like fatdave. I’m guessing that a good-sized Linux distro is probably the champ -when I downloaded Slackware over my 56k connection, the total download time was ~40 hours (luckily, not at once). Slackware, incidentally, is pretty small.
Of course, I’m way too damn lazy to do a search for the real champ
Like fatdave. I’m guessing that a good-sized Linux distro is probably the champ -when I downloaded Slackware over my 56k connection, the total download time was ~40 hours (luckily, not at once). Slackware, incidentally, is pretty small.
Of course, I’m way too damn lazy to do a search for the real champ
Many archiving programs, like winzip, allow one to easily split a file into multiple parts. It probably won’t compress it any, but it’ll break it up for you.
sailor - Re: your Casablanca file. Is it MPEG1? If so, is it set to the NTSC frame rate of 29.976? I have re-encoded mpgs to the lower NTSCFilm standard frame rate of 23.97 and been able to fit movies up to 100 or so minutes on a VCD.
Yeah I thought of splitting it but what a pain. It is in ASF which I am not familiar with. Clicking “properties” does not yield any useful info.
BTW. I downloaded a movie from archives.org (14337, people from western china, MPG2, 252 MB) and windows media player 2 says it needs a codec and attempts a download but then says cannot find it. What codec is it and where can I find it? (or os the file corrupt?
This happens to me all the time with the weird files they have on that site. The only way I can get them to work is to follow their instructions exactly on the site.
And if I make the mistake of “upgrading” WMP, it somehow “loses” the ability to view the files, until I do everything over again. It makes no freaking sense at all to me.
If you’re talking legal files, there’s probably not much out there that’s bigger than what can fit on a CD. MPEGs up to about 800MB can fit on an 80 minute CD, so if there’s a legal movie (or audio CD) out there that’s that size, it’d probably be tops.
Going outside the restrictions of the OP, there are people pirating X-Box games that fill up entire 4.5 GB DVD-Rs!
BTW, sailor, just use TMPGEnc or a video editor to chop off some of the ending credits and get it down to 800MB if it’s an MPEG and it’ll fit on a VCD. If it’s Divx, you’d have to get it down to 700MB, and thus, would have to go the two-CD route.
Re-encoding something to NTSCFilm is a procedure I would recommend only to someone who has a bit of knowledge about digital video. If your file is 29.97 fps, you have to inverse telecine the movie to encode it to NTSCFilm. Some programs really suck at judging which frames to pick out and you can wind up with a lackluster final product.
If done right, however, IvTC with NTSCFilm will yield the same quality movie at a lower file size, since it doesn’t have to allocate bits to duplicate frames.
sailor - TMPGEnc does a smashing job of encoding video files of all types to VCD specs (or any MPEG spec you set up). It also does a great job of splitting mpg’s. Simply use the slider and mark the cut point. VirtualDub does the opposite: converts video files to various Windows Media formats using any valid codec you’ve got installed on your PC. It’s also pretty straightforward in chopping a movie up into parts. Both these programs are shareware/freeware, easy to use, and (at least on my lowly 1.2GHz PC) can re-render a video file in near real-time (read: about as long as it takes to watch the movie). IME, .asf files look like crap to begin with but TMPGEnc ought to be able to make something viewable out of it so you can watch it using a DVD player.
Re: discovering the codec of an unknown file. I use VirtualDub for this. Open it in VD and choose File/File Information. If it’s a valid video file it will tell you not only what codec it needs, but also what version of the codec, frame rate, audio and video bit rates, and a whole lot more. Then head over to the DivX Digest codecs page and download the one(s) you need.
sailor - TMPGEnc does a smashing job of encoding video files of all types to VCD specs (or any MPEG spec you set up). It also does a great job of splitting mpg’s. Simply use the slider and mark the cut point. VirtualDub does the opposite: converts video files to various Windows Media formats using any valid codec you’ve got installed on your PC. It’s also pretty straightforward in chopping a movie up into parts. Both these programs are shareware/freeware, easy to use, and (at least on my lowly 1.2GHz PC) can re-render a video file in near real-time (read: about as long as it takes to watch the movie). IME, .asf files look like crap to begin with but TMPGEnc ought to be able to make something viewable out of it so you can watch it using a DVD player.
Re: discovering the codec of an unknown file. I use VirtualDub for this. Open it in VD and choose File/File Information. If it’s a valid video file it will tell you not only what codec it needs, but also what version of the codec, frame rate, audio and video bit rates, and a whole lot more. Then head over to the DivX Digest codecs page and download the one(s) you need.
