Distribyted

Distribyted tries to make easier integrations with other applications among torrent files, presenting them as a standard filesystem.

We aim to use some compressed file characteristics to avoid download it entirely, just the parts that we'll need.

Also, if the file format is not supported, distribyted can stream and seek through the file if needed.

Note that distribyted is in alpha version, it is a proof of concept with a lot of bugs. Use Cases

• Play multimedia files on your favorite video or audio player. These files will be downloaded on demand and only the needed parts.
• Explore TBs of data from public datasets only downloading the parts you need. Use Jupyter Notebooks directly to process or analyze this data.
• Play your ROM backups directly from the torrent file. You can have virtually GBs in games and only downloaded the needed ones.

Supported Expandable File Formats

Distribyted can show some kind of files directly as folders, making it possible for applications read only the parts that they need. Here is a list of supported, to be supported and not supported formats. Supported

• zip: Able to uncompress just one file. The file is decompressed to a temporal file sequentially to make possible seek over it. The decompression stops if no one is reading it.

To Be Supported

• tar: Seek to any file and inside that files using a modified standard library. Not useful on .tar.gz files.
• 7zip: Similar to Zip. Need for a library similar to zip.
• xz: Only worth it when the file is created using blocks. Possible library here and here.

Not Supported

• gzip: As far as I know, it doesn't support random access.