[Shotimes] Ford Service Manual DVDs

[Jon Heese]

Note: This post is a little long, but please bear with me if you're 
interested in the topic.

As some of you may know, I currently host the 1992-2002 Ford Service 
Manual CD ISOs at http://www.jonheese.com/fordcds.  AFAIK, starting with 
the 2003 model year, the Service Manual CD turned into a Service Manual 
DVD.  On one hand, this is good because it means that Ford could cram 
even more information (i.e. cars *and* trucks) onto the disc, but the 
obvious down side for us is that the ~4.96 GB DVD ISOs are uncomfortably 
large and difficult to distribute.  Another concern at this point is 
that these DVD images will not fit on a standard single-layer DVD-R 
since they are slightly larger than 4.7 GB.  This is of less importance 
due to programs like DaemonTools, which allow a stored image to be 
mounted as a "virtual disc".

I have recently been offered access to the full set of Ford Service 
Manual DVDs by a member of the SHO community, but have been daunted by 
the aforementioned size concern.  The only viable solution I've thought 
of is to put the images up for download through the BitTorrent protocol.

For those unfamiliar with BitTorrent, it's basically a file-sharing 
protocol that lives on top of the web.  For a more in-depth description, 
check out the BT FAQ:

http://dessent.net/btfaq/#what

In order to download the DVD images via BitTorrent, each person 
downloads and installs a BitTorrent client (I recommend BitTornado), and 
just opens a small (~100KB) torrent file with it.  Based on the 
information in the torrent file, this client program connects to 
everyone else downloading this specific file and the whole group of them 
trades with each other until everyone has what everyone needs.  This 
results in very fast transfer speeds without the huge hit on the 
original server.

So, the question: Is anyone interested in this?  This is technically OT 
since it only applies to 2003 and later service manuals, but I think 
there still may be enough interest in this for me to publish and seed a 
few torrents.  If not, I won't bother getting the new DVD images and 
we'll just stick with 1992-2002.

PLEASE RESPOND OFF-LIST.

Regards,
Jon Heese