Elephants Dream: 500,000 Downloads
Ton confirms on the Elephants Dream website that the total number of downloads has now passed 500,000. Because not all the numbers from the mirrors are in yet, he estimates that the real number may be as high as 1,000,000.
There were hundreds of other sites linking to the Orange blog (and some even to BlenderNation!) and the overall effect was a mega-Slashdotting that lasted for a full seven days. The only thing we could do was to switch off the Orange blog, replace it with one static HTML file and remove all the download links that pointed to download.blender.org.
By now, the site is still very busy but the were low enough to restore the blog.
well the torrent tracker had a lot of work, too
freek’in awesome ;)
Elephant’s Dream is very good – for those of you on dial-up, poor you – you really are missing out. The modelling and animation in the short movie (~10 minutes) is superb, even if the storyline is a little difficult to grasp, Emo’s voice was not well suited for the modelled character (or vice versa)
Otherwise it is superb, the sound mixing is excellent, the lighting, animation and modelling are awesome and it’s no wonder that Elephant’s Dream has reached so high a number of downloads. The scene that is my personal favourite was the one with the ‘elevator’.
Overall, a very good short movie made completely in open source. It has quality matching professional studios (this makes it sound like the movie wasn’t expected to reach such a quality!) and ‘Orange’ certainly brings out its own particular modelling and animation style (dark and intense) which would be interesting to use in future open-source movies…
@rpgsimmaster
“for those of you on dial-up, poor you – you really are missing out.”
Of course they still have the opportunity to actually buy the DVD, or maybe thats just too far out an idea… Now if just one out of ten actually did that.
The real amount of downloads is something that’s hard to track. People download from another people, websites hosting a mirror from a mirror and a lot more. I think Ton ir right about 1 million, but I even think it is a little higher then that. Still it’s amazing how fast the spreading of ED went. In a few hours there were already bunches of people sharing it over P2P networks, quite amazing.
True, they could buy a DVD… I forgot about that… Certainly the money would go to a good purpose
@well: indeed. In fact when I was downloading, more than 80.000 people were sharing ED on BitTorrent.
(Imagelink fixed)
Well, I actually didn`t manage to download this film even with a strong www connection! After some 6hrs I gave up. Looking fwd the lowering of the traffic:)
@Silgrin4d: use the torrent instead of the http:// downloads. I reached 800kb/s with the torrent download.
i’m also waiting for alowering of the traffic to see it :(
i also seriously dought that all the copies could be tracked i remeber youtube was had a copy be fore the oficail release there must be a few more like that. not to mention the real number of viewers would most likely be much higher as well. as most people will show more than one other person.
For those of you whinning about not being able to download ….
Since people now download less, I can post my mirror links, it is quite fast on my tests:
http://www.ruicampos.com/fl_tmp/ED/elephantsdream-1024-h264-st-aac.mov
http://www.ruicampos.com/fl_tmp/ED/elephantsdream-720-h264-st-aac.mov
http://www.ruicampos.com/fl_tmp/ED/elephantsdream-480-h264-st-aac.mov
Have fun.
PS: If I get low on bandwidth I will cut it off, but I still have 390 GB for this month…
Youtube, bittorrent, and google video were probably far more used than the the other download methods. So I suspect that the 1 million mark is a drastic underestimate.
LetterRip
well mentioned at the german computer channel http://www.golem.de
http://golem.de/0606/45758.html