Every now and then, when I’m connected to a torrent a peer will connect that has a reference to “Swarm Merging” in their name. What is swarm merging?
BitTorrent v2 allows this also. In v1, torrents with multiple files are hashed continuously (cat) together without respect to file boundaries. A side effect of this that many people notice is that to grab a specific file may require downloading some of the files before or after the one you want.
Under v2, each file is hashed separately, so this fixes the aforementioned problem and should allow sharing of files across torrent files.
You can extract, calculate and compare those hashes using this tool.
In the next bug-fix release of libtorrent the tool will have ability to generate magnet links to download torrents without duplicate files, saving storage, bandwidth and most importantly time.
Very useful for dumps, libraries, video/photo archives ;)
