For collections Bittorrent is your best options for getting a whole collection of files, and we prefer the qBittorrent client. Here is how:
Browse to a directory that includes the torrent files for the DEF CON year you are interested in, for example media.defcon.org/DEF CON 27/
Either double click on the torrent file you want to trigger qBittorrent, or download the torrent file and open manually in qBittorrent. Please keep the torrent seeding once it is complete to help everyone else downloading like you just did.
To subscribe to all torrent files use qBittorrent RSS subscription feature to add our RSS feed. qBittorrent will now start to download every torrent, about 1.1 TB worth, and once done will keep up to date on future torrents.
If you don't have or don't want to use bittorrent you can always go old skool with wget and automate your downloads. To discourage this due to our limited bandwidth I won't show you any examples how.
Note: Once in a while the directory a torrent is built off of changes. Files get renamed, spelling mistakes get fixed, or directory structures change. This leads to you having more files on your local disk than are needed. To correct this the safest thing to do is delete the torrent file and the directory of files it is associated with and re-download the torrent to get a fresh sync.
Fow Windows10 Edge users it is simple. From the MS Store install this free CODEC. Once installed everything just works.
For Chrome, FireFox, the Tor Browser Bundle, and Brave we don't have a solution for you yet. We can't find a plug in or extension to make HEVC work. If you know of a solution please tell us!
The amount of space savings from HEVC is too great to ignore, with average savings of 50-75 percent. We use two pass Average Bit Rate(ABR) encoding, but as of June 2020 we will switch to Variable Bit Rate (VBR). Once we purchase a new GPU that supports HEVC B frames we will try a value of 3.
We have a dedicated forum for all things DEF CON, get involved with the community and make recommendations.
You can email us [info] @ [defcon.org] or on Twitter DM DEFCON information and links to any missing archives we don't currently host and we'll be happy to get them mirrored. Also, if you see errors or mistakes please let us know and we'll do our best to make corrections.