Recently my NAS took some physical damage and the HDDs are not too happy about it. Most of my video files are partially corrupted. Meaning, they report some errors when checked with ffmpeg[1], and when you watch them they’ll sometimes freeze or skip a few seconds, but they’re not so corrupt they won’t play. So, the vast majority of the file is fine. I’d prefer to avoid re-downloading all of my media when such a small fraction of the total file is damaged.
Is there any way to only download chunks of the file that have errors?
In the mean time, I can repack and ignore errors[2] so that the freezing/pausing stops during playback, but it’ll still skip parts or otherwise act up.
Oh cool! I had considered that as maybe being an option but I wasn’t sure if it would actually work or not. I can’t afford a VPN right now so I wasn’t going to try, I figured I’d go ahead and ask so when I can get one running I can jump right in.
Now, will it know the difference between “missing” and “corrupt”?
If you are using torrent then yeah, each file will be checked and the bad parts redownloaded.
Missing or corrupted does not matter.
Each torrent divides its content in a lot of small parts. Correct one are kept, anything else redownloaded. Simple and effective.