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I think it doesn't actually work like that -- until you've got the whole lot, none of your downloaded files are valid. I'd love to know exactly how it works, but it seems to fill the files in the order it receives the blocks, whether or not that's the right order. This surely involves it in reshuffling the blocks when the right ones do arrive, but maybe it does that on-the-fly too. It must be a bit like those jigsaw screensavers.



I haven't used the official BT client for a while, so I don't know how it works now. With Azureus, the best BT client I have found, you can open files before the whole torrent is downloaded (including previewing parts of video clips, given a codec that can cope with that). You can even tell it not to download some files in the torrent, so in this case you could tell it only to download one of the two zip files.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
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