Utatane and WinMX
"Most of those I have in download queue show 0 and 0. So I guess they are idle, yet it's better idle than letting me download something."
Yeah, queues in Utatane are never long. In this case, they were either away from their keyboard, or else they couldn't find anything in your collection that they wanted. What time of day were you online? Do you have some files that you think the other guy might like?
"Can't afford a load of HD space to dedicate. I usually download through torrents and burn on DVD a couple of weeks later."
I make txt file dummies of the files I have burned to DVD, so they can request them if they want.
"I actually have more than 60Gb of stuff spread around the HD, but they aren't organized (as I shuffle stuff to free space continuously) and I've noticed that Utatane doesn't let me add files that happen to have chinese characters (since most torrents arrive from minip2p)."
OpenNap users are fairly picky about labeling. It needs to have a tag at the beginning like (AV) or (IV) or whatever, so they can sort through your collection. I have a couple of videos downloaded from torrents in my shared library, but I just rename them to the original Japanese DVD title.
"I also tried your FAQ with WinMX, and it's a bit better. At least it searches for sources on its own, resumes download and shows your number in the queue."
I do like, and use WinMX a fair bit. Just to be clear though, Utatane resumes downloads, but actually you rarely need to because the people you are trading with almost always stay online till you both finish. If you turn on auto-complete, it will even reconnect if you lose your connection. Utatane also has auto-trade features built in, while for WinMX you have to get MX Monitor to do that.
"On Utatane a file could be shared between 100 clients, but you'll always just connect to one manually."
Actually, if you ever get a download started, you'll find it finishes faster in Utatane than WinMX. Utatane is newer and more streamlined. There are more people on T1 or T3, and even between two DSL connections the downloads can be quite fast. Most people devote all their bandwidth to a single exchange, and they never go offline in the middle.
"On WinMX, you queue the file and the more sources the better. So, maybe, it works."
You are right that it is possible to download several files at once, and get multiple sources for each file in much the same way Share does. In the right conditions, I can get WinMX downloading as fast as Utatane or Rapidshare. Share can go faster still, but in WinMX and Utatane the speeds are pretty steady. In Share, you get these bursts, and then longer periods of no downloads at all.
"I'm trying to download this rare thing: 栃木佳 激写 Vol.30 小悪魔 栃木佳 日本メディアサプライ. But still no luck. At least on WinMX I'm seeing queue numbers decrease..."
The real advantage to Share is that if there is a complete file out there, you'll probably get it if you stay online long enough. With WinMX, it is better to try to download files with multiple sources, because users with large collections of rare videos are likely to be using MX Monitor, limiting themselves to one for one exchanges. Once a file spreads though, there will be users who will upload it to anyone.
I have been using WinMX for years, and I've managed to download thousands of Japanese videos with it. It is especially good for recent J-dramas. I got into Utatane a couple of months ago, and then Share just recently. Right now, I tend to alternate between all three. OpenNap has the most files and then Share, but I find WinMX easy to use, and it's good for older videos and popular stuff.
