How I downloaded Big Bang Theory Season 9 in my unstable network.

I take serious measures to get things right when it comes to downloading TV series. But today, I have been proven wrong. My day goes like this.

I planned to download Big Bang Theory Season 9 after another exhausting FRIENDS marathon AGAIN. I followed the routine.

Put the torrent magnet on direct-torrents and wait for it to be seeded.

I even clicked the → button and believed it would actually fasten it. But It almost took three hours to be seeded and the file to be available.

I have a 512kbps extremely unstable internet connection. It would take a day to download 3GB. I hate downloading files via Chrome because you can never resume a download there. So I use wget and there comes my 2nd problem. The files were served via SSL and so wget kept throwing me 403:FORBIDDEN. I tried the download on Chrome and it was working fine. So I made my wget fake the connection that the request was actually from the browser by changing the User-Agent. With a simple wget -U “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.94 Safari/537.36” the download starts working.

ETA 22 hours.

As I expected, It was going to take a whole day to complete the download. It was midnight and I had to find something to keep me occupied for one whole day which doesn't involve my laptop. Right then, I got a text message.

"Buy 2 Get 3 free".

Problem Solved. But the bus trip was gonna be boring. So I thought maybe I can download a movie which I could watch on the trip. I deleted Big Bang Theory from the queue in a way that doesn’t affect my download and added FINDING DORY ❤ to the queue. Since the torrent had a high number of seeders, It was instantly available.

ETA 10 hours.

I had to leave the by 6am. So I stopped Big Bang Theory download. But direct-torrents doesn't have a user cache. So I had to seed Big Bang Theory all over again because I deleted it from the queue. I added it to the queue and the movie was downloading without any trouble. Time for a pleasant sleep.

ETA 4 hours. The next day.

I woke up and found FINDING DORY downloaded and Big Bang Theory was ready to be downloaded again. But I had already downloaded some part of that zip file. Thanks to wget -c,it was back on track resuming from the part where I stopped the download. I was going to leave my laptop unattended for a whole day and so I prepared it for the worst. I gave it the lowest display power and lock screen on 5 seconds of inactivity. I could have just closed the lid and went with no suspend but somehow it interfered with my Wi-Fi connection. My laptop can run for 3 hours without power in this setting and that's better than most.

ETA 18 hours.

I returned home by midnight. I get into my room to check the download. It was at 98% but has become static. This means direct-torrents removed the file as I couldn’t complete the download in a day. So I add the file again and waited for another 3 hours.

ETA 20 minutes.

It was wget time. The download ran for some time and again stopped because of network reset. I use wget -c to get it back and I know the file is still available because if not I would have got a 404. The terminal said.

The file is already fully retrieved; nothing to do.  

But I'm aware the download stopped at 99%. This means I have a broken zip which I am unable to resume.

ETA 10 minutes.

So I thought maybe I could extract the zip file and just download the files that are damaged. Extraction succeeded. Yay!!

The folder contained 48 SRT files alone.

The zip file was clearly 3.6GB but the extraction only had 44 SRT files which were merely 1.5MB. Back to square 1.

ETA -_- I still didn’t lose hope.

I opened the file in Bless and checked for .mp4 hex. Results found : 72.

So Yes, All the episodes were in there but I couldn't extract them.

I tried to fix the zip file with zip -FF but it just returned me an empty zip file.

The file wasn't broken but something has gone wrong. I go back to the torrent site to check the file structure. The zip file consisted of all episodes in mp4 and a compressed file of all subtitles.

Out of options, I tried unzipping the file from the command line with unzip.

It threw an error "End-of-central-directory signature not found".

The problem was clear now. The file download wasn't completed. When the network reset occurred, the compressed file with subtitles was downloaded. When I tried to resume to download there was an EOF mismatch with both compressed files which made wget think it had fully retrieved the file.That is why on extraction in GUI, I got the 48 srt files and the zip -FF couldn’t fix the zip.

ETA 0 minutes.

Time to Google. I checked for file extractors which doesn't check for EOF. After an extensive search and skimming through stack-overflow, I found that jar files were actually inner zip files but don’t have a End-of-central-directory signature.

I took a leap of faith and tried to extract zip files as how we would extract a jar file using jar -xvf.

The mp4 files were extracted one by one and the corrupted file was just the sample mp4. At 4am, I finally downloaded Big Bang Theory season 9 completely.

To be honest, the season sucked BIG TIME.