[warnold]

Originally Posted by Yujinbito

Well, there's a help topic kicking around in the Suki message boards that says that if you need, say, episodes 4 and 5 of a series but they're only available in a batch and you already have episode 1-3 that you can stop the batch download, delete the 'files' for 1-3 and then paste your completed 1-3 into the folder, at which point it will continue downloading as though those episodes were already finished.

That also works if it's episodes 1,3,5. Or any other combination...

So I assumed that it just downloaded in order. Also, I thought that it might, like you say, download randomly and so I checked the file sizes.

Depending on which client you have you can see different things when checking sizes. Some clients will start by creating all the files at full size, so they can just place the data they get in the correct place immediatly. Others will grow the file whenever there's a new piece beyond the end. Others will just put the blocks in the files as a holding place, and them move them to the correct place as convenient.

The file that I wanted to watch was around 175 megs - which seems standard for one episode. The next episode in the folder was around 65 megs and all the rest were 0. Since the batch was around 14 or 15% done, it made sense to me that the first episode in the batch was already finished and the second one was a little less than halfway and the rest had not been started yet. All evidence seemed to indicate that it downloaded in order, but perhaps it was just a big coincidence.

You probably have the third type of client, so not only was the file not finished, it had random pieces of the other files in the batch stuck in the middle of it.

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-billy-