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Another problem with torrents is compression of files. Compressing a torrent makes it impossible to select only 1 file from a big collection.

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This is true. But afaik it's frowned upon and it's not really a big deal in serious communities.

I would think this is a failure of the client, which should support compression formats well enough to be able to fish around inside of the compressed file once it got the metadata portion (zip directory or whatever).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_%28file_format%29#Design: A directory is placed at the end of a .ZIP file. This identifies what files are in the .ZIP and identifies where in the .ZIP that file is located. This allows .ZIP readers to load the list of files without reading the entire .ZIP archive.

This is a great idea! I wonder why it hasn't already been implemented

I think it is because most torrent client developers are focused on the protocol rather than the end-user experience.

Here is a tool that makes it possible to preview video/audio quality by getting the first and last .rar file: http://techzil.com/play-rar-files-without-extracting-uisng-d...

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