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Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#111

Post by Calwestjobs »

notpushkin wrote: post #54
aaron695 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> degrades their control over the content Encryption (can work with sharing), signatures, fall back to CDN. Control is not an issue. > torrents are good enough. Torrents can't do the massive market of livestream, like sports or season finales or reality TV / news. This is the entire point of the question. > The only entities And everyone kicked off of YouTube or doesn't want to use big corporations on principal, like…

> Encryption (can work with sharing), signatures, fall back to CDN. Control is not an issue. And of course if an encryption key gets leaked, you can just rotate it. Since it’s a stream, past content is not as important. (That said, I don’t think it will help — any DRM can be cracked, and there’s plenty of online TV streaming sites even with the current centralized systems.)

you can stream blockbuster movie which got released yesterday. DRM is important.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#113

Post by ralferoo »

delusional wrote: post #95
bawolff wrote: post #62

Part of the reason bit torrent works really well is that the file is downloaded in random order. It lets everyone cooperate, while still being robust to bad peers, bad network connections, churn etc. If you want live high quality streaming, a lot of reasons bit torrent works so well goes away. Latency matters. In bit torrent if the peer goes away, no big deal, just try again in 5 minutes with another peer, you are do…

I don't think people are appreciating the nuance of what you're saying. Most of what you are saying isn't accurate for netflix style streaming, which would actually be more aptly called "video on demand", but is very applicable to "live streaming" in the sense of live sporting events or news broadcasts. Video-on-demand is perfectly implementable on top of BitTorrent. As you say, there are some latency pitfalls you'll…

I don't think he's saying it needs to be BitTorrent, just applying some principles from it.

For example, say you have a cluster of people on the call in the US and another cluster in the UK. Ping times are 100ms or more across the ocean, there will be some random packets lost, but ping times within the UK are around 15ms max. By working co-operatively and sharing among themselves the clients in one cluster can fill in missing packets from a different cluster far quicker than the requesting them from the originating host.

In general, the ability to request missing packets from a more local source should be able to improve overall video call quality. It still might be "too late", because for minimal latency, you might choose to use packets as soon as they arrive and maybe even treat out-of-order packets as missing, and just display a blockier video instead, but if the clients can tolerate a little more latency (maybe a tunable setting, like 50ms more than the best case) then it should in theory work better than current systems.

I've been mulling over some of these ideas myself in the past, but it's never been high enough on my TODO list to try anything out.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#114

Post by delusional »

ralferoo wrote: post #113
delusional wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people are appreciating the nuance of what you're saying. Most of what you are saying isn't accurate for netflix style streaming, which would actually be more aptly called "video on demand", but is very applicable to "live streaming" in the sense of live sporting events or news broadcasts. Video-on-demand is perfectly implementable on top of BitTorrent. As you say, there are some latency pitfalls you'll…

I don't think he's saying it needs to be BitTorrent, just applying some principles from it. For example, say you have a cluster of people on the call in the US and another cluster in the UK. Ping times are 100ms or more across the ocean, there will be some random packets lost, but ping times within the UK are around 15ms max. By working co-operatively and sharing among themselves the clients in one cluster can fill i…

> By working co-operatively and sharing among themselves the clients in one cluster can fill in missing packets from a different cluster far quicker than the requesting them from the originating host.

That's only true if you assume the nodes operate sequentially, which is not given. If the nodes operate independently from one another (which they would, being non-cooperating) they'd all get a response in ~100ms (computation and signaling time is negligible here), which is faster than they could get it cooperatively, even if we assume perfect cooperation (100ms for the first local node + 15ms from there). It's parallelism. Doing less work might seem theoretically nice, but if you have the capacity to do the same work twice simultaneously you avoid the synchronization.

Basically, it falls somewhere in my loose "tree based system" sketch. In this case the "trusted" nodes would be picked based on ping time clustering, but the basic sketch that you pick a subset of nodes to be your local nodes and then let that structure recursively play out is the same.

The problem you run into is latency. There's no good way to pick a global latency figure for the whole network, since it varies by how deep into the tree you are. As the tree grows deeper, you end up having to retune the delay. The only other option is to grow in width at which point you've just created a another linear growth problem, albeit with a lower slope.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#116

Post by jannw »

Lots of technical discussions - but the real answer is that bittorrent/P2P was displaced by Netflix for all but a small number of hard-core users. That, combined with legal threats, and that p2p required volume/scale to work well, meant that the critical mass died. It was a sad day that we, the users of the internet, en-mass exchanged bittorrent for streaming companies.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#117

Post by rklaehn »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #103
rklaehn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shame it's being abused by crypto bros who want to treat it as money. Iroh contributor here. I don't know what you are referring to. Iroh is just a library to provide direct QUIC connections between devices, even if they are behind a NAT. We don't have any plans doing a blockchain or an ICO or anything like that. I am not aware of any project called Iroh that is a scam, but if there is, please provide a link here.…

I actually wasn't referring to iroh but rather ipfs / the stratos thing that I mentioned. My only gripe with iroh currently is that its browser wasm feels too much for me/ I don't want to learn rust. So I actually wanted to build something that required connectivity and I used nostr because nostr is great for website and not gonna lie ,its awesome as well (but nostr is also riddled with crypto bros :( )

OK, thanks for the clarification.

I have nothing against crypto in principle, but I really don't want Iroh to be associated with crypto scams.

Iroh is just a library for p2p connections. You can use it for crypto, but I would say that the majority of our users are non-crypto(currency).

We will try to make the wasm version easier to use, but if nostr works well for you, go for it! Not the right place if you want to avoid crypto bros though :-)

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#118

Post by Calwestjobs »

karel-3d wrote: post #80
bawolff wrote: post #62

Part of the reason bit torrent works really well is that the file is downloaded in random order. It lets everyone cooperate, while still being robust to bad peers, bad network connections, churn etc. If you want live high quality streaming, a lot of reasons bit torrent works so well goes away. Latency matters. In bit torrent if the peer goes away, no big deal, just try again in 5 minutes with another peer, you are do…

I am not convinced about the random order stuff. If most people will stream from the start then the start will be more seeded? So it's all good. And the order is requested by the client, and there are clients that go in the sequential order, like Deluge

yes you are correct, BitTorrent - sequential download also works exactly like that.

people seem to have need for 0ms nano ultra low latency streams for watching movies,... they are insane. they want to be extraordinary high speed traders but with movies not stocks. insane

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#119

Post by Calwestjobs »

delusional wrote: post #97
karel-3d wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not convinced about the random order stuff. If most people will stream from the start then the start will be more seeded? So it's all good. And the order is requested by the client, and there are clients that go in the sequential order, like Deluge

If everybody starts at the start then it will be very poorly seeded when everybody wants it, before the being well seeded right when nobody needs it.

"well seeded" means what exactly?

if i can send 2 copies of piece to 2 people immediately as i got it, then if my download takes 20 ms and sending it another 20 ms is it "well seeded" for those 3 people after 50 ms? or after how much time it is "well seeded" ?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

#120

Post by Calwestjobs »

bawolff wrote: post #87
karel-3d wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not convinced about the random order stuff. If most people will stream from the start then the start will be more seeded? So it's all good. And the order is requested by the client, and there are clients that go in the sequential order, like Deluge

If we are talking about a live stream (and not a stream of a static file), having the start be more seeded is useless.

mpeg stream / TS filetype / DVB-T/C/S broadcast IS static file, all 3 is same format, this format deals with every point you made... download specs and educate yourself.

same with streaming audio, chunk IS static file, so every phone call you made last 30 years is static file.

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