Problem:
a big download with small/jumpy download rates. Remaining time will jump from a few hours to 100+ days rendering that information useless.
Smoothing won't help here much since the rates are just too different.
Proposed solution:
Use a long term rate calculation and display that in addition to the current calculation.
The long term calculation would not use the current rate but instead the elapsed time and the amount downloaded until now.
That boils down to:
remaining_time = (elapsed_time) ( (1/download_percentage) -1)
Example:
A 100k download, downloaded so far: 20k, time since start of download: 10s
remaining_time = 10s * ((1/0.20) - 1) = 10s * (5-1) = 40s
This will be jumpy too at the beginning but stabilize very soon. It would even catch outages with zero download sizes.
Thanks for your efforts and this very useful program!