It wouldn't only be used for verification. I think the main purpose would be this:
Let's say I want to download an album. That would be a set of music files, maybe some image files for the covers.. and maybe a text file with some info about the album.
Now, I could manually look up each file and hope they're all part of the same collection.. But we all hate doing that.
What if I could download one single file. One single file containing information about the others. And then my client could read that information and automatically get the other files.
Something like "Mirza - Greatest Hits (2003).xfv" could look like:
Code: Select all
<? xml ?>
<collection title="Mirza - Greatest Hits (2003)">
<file name="01 Eat me.ogg" size="1234567" crc32="something" sha1="something" />
<file name="02 My daddy likes you.ogg" size="7654321" md5="something" />
<file name="Cover - Front.png" size="123456" foo="bar" />
<!-- etc -->
</collection>
I'm not asking anyone to implement this into DC++ or anything. (That will probably have to wait until hashing is implemented) I'm posting here to see what you people think about it. Is it a good idea? Is XFV a suitable name? Has it already been done? (I can't seem to find anything.. and even if it has, I'd like to see it used.. I'm so sick of searching for files)
If I can get a "That's a good idea!" I'm planning to construct a decent website, make some software to easily read and write the files, get the layout of the xml into shape (make some sort of standard) and start advocating this to clients like Shareaza etc and release groups.
Suggestions are welcome!