Questions for techies

[ballistic]

Just curious, what are UDP ports and why do they need to be open as well as TCP?

Also, there are a few posts complaining about file corruptions and someone commented "well, the public think they work" - well they do!!! Should I be worried that 25% of my "short films" downloaded with warnings but seem to play ok? Am I spreading them to other people who can't play them for some reason?

Can anyone explain what type of file corruption it detects and could it be actually caused at this end as sometimes my computer crashes during a download?

[murasame]

Well, the corruption it detects is the same kind of corruption that you can have while downloading directly frrom the internet: a download gets corrupted during the process of download and a faulty Byte or two appear, making LW recognise it as corrupt (that's my own explanation to the thing. Wait for devs and/or other "techies" to clear things up). This files will mostly play fine (in certain players) but you might encounter slight corruptions of the image and/or sound when the player reads the corrupt byte(s). In Quicktime player (for example), while playing back a vid with a corrupt byte, the player might interpret it as a stop point, thus ending a 700M file prematurely. VLC will play that file fine (Almost. Some corrupt files will freeze the image at the corruption point but the sound will keep going or vice-versa) but I've found that the smoothest player for that kind of thing is mplayer.
Too bad it doesn't support subtitles in .ogm (and maybe .mkv too)...

[murasame]

Also, UDP is User Datagram Protocol and TCP is Transfer Control Protocol. Go figure what these are for though...