@ssd:
1. Upload both versions packaged as a complete HD and SD set. 1 torrent.
Example: https://www.gaytorrent.ru/details.php?id=09684cc0224d17696d373638dd080287d52aa93e5f20bf94
Pros: users can pick and choose which files they wish to download, HD or SD versions, or everything. And everything is in a neat package.
Question: if users don't download the entire torrent, will they be seen by the tracker / client as Leechers and therefore have their uploading bandwidth curtailed - i.e. locked into poor upload speeds for choosing only specific files to download ? Does the tracker / client discriminate between users with full set of files versus partial sets ?
I'm a user and posted about this problem a few months ago:
https://forum.gaytorrent.ru/index.php?topic=62263
The tracker sees you as a leecher if you download and then seed only some of the files in a multi-file torrent. My preference is for smaller torrents so that I am more likely to download the whole thing so I will be seen a seeder and not as an eternal leecher. This is one of my pet peeves with torrenting but apparently it is just the way it works and has nothing to do with gaytorrent.ru in particular. Eventually, I have to stop seeding it temporarily or permanently. Right now, I am supposedly downloading ten torrents. Two have no seeders and I'm just hoping one will appear but eight are collections that I've partially downloaded and I'm actually partially seeding them rather than actively leeching. They still count against the limit of the total number of torrents that I can download simultaneously.
It is unlikely that one downloader will want more than one file out of a selection of different quality versions of the same video. Best practice from my viewpoint would be for those to be separate torrents. I prefer higher quality torrents and before I download a file, I always search to see what other sizes may be available on the site so I can choose the torrent with the highest quality. You could also put in your description of each file information about the other related files.
The few times I have downloaded a file from a multi-file torrent of the same video of varying quality, I stopped seeding after a week or two and deleted the torrent to keep the one file that I wanted. I would have preferred to keep seeding indefinitely but don't want to that torrent to count as downloading indefinitely.
As far as collections of videos, a 5 GB collection of five 1 GB videos is reasonable, especially if they are a very closely-related collection such as the same two actors filmed in a sequence of videos on the same day. If the collection is one actor paired with other actors in various scenes in different locations on different days, it is slightly less likely that someone would want all five videos. If it is various scenes of various actors from a single studio or a complete site rip as a theme, it is even less likely that someone will want all of the videos. Also, the more videos in a torrent, regardless of how closely related they are by theme, the less likely it is that someone will want them all.
A side effect of downloading only some of the files in a multi-file torrent is that the BitTorrent client will download small amounts of adjacent files on the list and then reserve space for those entire files on my hard drive even though I'm not actually downloading them at all. My drives are usually close to full, so that is irritating. I don't want a 1 GB file to use up 2 GB on my drive because space is reserved for adjacent files on the list of files in the torrent. The only way to take care of that is to stop seeding and delete the torrent, move the complete file that I downloaded and want, and delete the partial files that were adjacent.
I don't think that BitTorrent clients discriminate against peers with partial files. Some more advanced ones even take into account which downloading peers have which parts to be more efficient. Speed shouldn't be affected. (Someone with more knowledge please correct me on this if I'm wrong.)
This may be controversial, so you might want to check with a moderator, but if you upload a multi-file torrent, it is likely that someone desperate to improve their ratio will come along and break it up into individual torrents and then upload all of them separately. Someone might also only want one of the files and then decide to make and upload a torrent of it. So, you might want to go ahead and do it yourself if you are uploading a multi-file torrent. I don't know if there is a formal rule or even an informal etiquette rule prohibiting that, so again, you might want to run it past a moderator.
