[Libtorrent-devel] Re: "could not parse bencoded data"

[Charles Clark]

| From:     Harm Geerts <harmgeerts at home.nl>

| On Tuesday 28 November 2006 22:54, David Slimp wrote:
| > What would that mean....
| >
| > if the torrent file works fine with uTorrent, but not rTorrent?
| >
| > I mean.... what would be the possible reasons for that?

The probable reason is that uTorrent is using DHT to find peers
even though it can't contact the tracker.

On Nov 16, mvgroup changed their tracker software and their
"announce" url. They don't have it set up to redirect from the
old url to the new one.

If you have bittornado installed you can fix the torrent file
with a command like this:

btreannounce.py 'http://www.mvgroup.org:2710/announce' BBC.Horizon.2006.Pandemic.DVB.XviD.MP3.torrent

I've tested it and the "reannounced" torrent works (connects to
the tracker).

I'm not sure if the command is always "btreannounce.py" as it is
on FreeBSD using the ports system; it may just be "reannounce"
or something like that. It is useful to have bittornado
installed as it has a tool for examining .torrent files and for
making them as well as this one for changing the announce url.

If you have mainline installed but not bittornado, you should be
able to find a similar reannounce/torrent editing command line
utility, but with a somewhat different name.

If you have uTorrent or azureus handy you can edit the torrent
files' announce url with those clients (and probably other gui
clients as well).

If non of that works for you, you can re-download the torrent
file from mvgroup:

http://forums.mvgroup.org/index.php?act=Tracker

You probably have to create a forum account at mvgroup in order
to reach that page.

| In my experience rtorrent often reports tracker errors with that message.

Yeah; if the tracker is busy and returns a 404 or a blank page
rtorrent will give the parse error. Usually it will be fine
after two or three connection attempts.

-- 
Charles Clark | cmc at stegosaur.us