video preview feature

[spod]

requested feature: ability to watch sample of video for unfinished downloads.

Many P2P apps like eMule and Bittorrent clients support this video-previewing feature, but I don't think many newsreaders do.

A lot of movie downloaders don't seem to know that watching a movie sample only requires completing the first rar archive part (containing the vital headers) to be complete.  So they download the entire rar set, then discover that the video/audio quality is junk. Then they search for another release of the same title to download, and repeat. I'm always surprised at the number of people who waste their time and bandwidth re-downloading complete sets of bad video files.

Although I realize it's not a big deal to just open the first rar file in VLC or other media player and watch a short video segment, I think it would be extremely helpful for many people (like the ones who don't know about VCDquality.com)  to have this sort of video preview feature built into Alt.Binz.

[afdad]

IMHO, the great advantage of ABZ is that it is an extremely lean and specialized program. It basically just downloads complete collections of whatever files (NZBs) - including, of course, the important par and unrar functions. Personally, I hope it stays this way. I don't want a "Swiss pocket knife" program that does everything, but at the cost of doing everything mediocre at best.

spod, as you point out, for people who know more or less what they're doing (e.g., visit VCDquality or read NFOs) a preview function is irrelevant. Furthermore, as every movie release is packed differently, uses a different video or DVD format, etc., I don't see a practical way to implement a preview function. In addition, there are so many posts that are NOT movies, the potential for unnessecary confusion and errors seems endless to me.