There are plenty. The problem is that it's pointless and far less effective. Centralized servers work great. The only viable reason for P2P we have found over the last 20 years seems to be illicit activity. Everyone else is just fine with regular servers.
Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
171–180 of 231 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
"if you pirate why would you stream when you can download and watch at your convenience?" Live events, e.g. sports? "why would you donate your bandwidth to them?" I don't know but people donate bandwidth for torrents, maybe it's 'free' for them?
And? If you're into it, you already pay through the nose for those. Let them pay for the bandwidth.
"If you're into it, you already pay through the nose for those"
I believe pirating is seen an alternative to paying through the nose?
I pay through the nose for most live sports I watch.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#173Part 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…
> Part of the reason bit torrent works really well is that the file is downloaded in random order. That's basically true for one client (transmission) - who specifically refuses to allow linear ordering. Most clients implement this. To enable it, its about a 3 sloc change. I hate clients that dont work for the user.
>That's basically true for one client (transmission) - who specifically refuses to allow linear ordering. Most clients implement this.
Transmission does allow you to set a particular file (let's say the first file in a series) as 'high priority' though so it's not like they don't allow any change to the behavior
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#174For a while, I was CTO of a company called Livestation [0], which as the Wikipedia article states, was "originally based on peer-to-peer technology acquired from Microsoft Research". This P2P stack was meant to allow for mass scaling of lowish latency video streaming, even in parts of the World with limited peer bandwidth to original content source servers. The VC-1 format got into a legal quagmire, as most video str…
I used LiveStation from time to time, and just for fun I was playing around with finding out when and how it employed P2P protocols. Needless to say, I never found any evidence of P2P in LiveStation. And now I know why :) Thank you for bringing up the warm memories I thought I no longer had.
Thanks for supporting a business that was pretty cool, once. I bailed as it got into the consumer livestream space, but sometimes think about resurrecting it as a higher-quality OTT app that isn't rammed with absolute junk and ads. The work that platform did during the Arab spring was significant, and I can't honestly point to a good modern alternative today.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#175You can stream over bittorrent... I do it all the time, you start your download, set it to download in order, and then just start watching it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Part of the reason bit torrent works really well is that the file is downloaded in random order. That's basically true for one client (transmission) - who specifically refuses to allow linear ordering. Most clients implement this. To enable it, its about a 3 sloc change. I hate clients that dont work for the user.
>That's basically true for one client (transmission) - who specifically refuses to allow linear ordering. Most clients implement this. Transmission does allow you to set a particular file (let's say the first file in a series) as 'high priority' though so it's not like they don't allow any change to the behavior
good for them. they specifically refuse to implement this feature even though its a tiny change for the 'good of the ecosystem' or something stupid.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#177Part 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…
Just for shits and giggles, I wonder if a protocol similar to HLS, where each peer is assigned a segment to transcode / cache, would work for best cases. If a peer drops, that segment is assigned to another peer. Or if there are, say, 5 peers, double up on the next segment to increase odds it will be done.
Just a mental curiosity is all.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The word "file" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
what is difference what kind of data chunk it is? 0 difference. or for university educated - he introduced file as a helpful abstraction, so i work with that abstraction, if you say it is not good abstraction then tell him. calling ts file a file is absolutely correct in any sense of word. just to be thorough. in philosophical debate we are having in computer science. ( yes toxic sarcasm )
that one post is more to the topic of OP is asking for, than 90% of comments here.
again NEWS, movies, comedy, trumps tarrifs, are streamed digitally to bilions of people over dvb-t/c/s every day. if how are bits ordered/chunked is important for you that much, that this already working system is not good for you in that sense ? makes no sense.
or explain little more, one sentence explaining whole world is k12 like. or 42 for book readers.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#179Part 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…
This comments on why bittorrent as is isn't used for live streaming, not why P2P shouldn't be used for live streaming > Latency matters. In bit torrent if the peer goes away, no big deal, just try again in 5 minutes with another peer, you are downloading in random order, who cares if one piecs is delayed 5 minutes. In a live stream your app is broken if it cuts out for 5 minutes. First of all, BitTorrent clients do n…
Nobody who does live streaming should set their gop to 6 seconds. That's way too big. I set ours to 2 seconds, which lets mobile adjust more quickly to their bandwidth limits.
And as a note, video segments for live are usually set to no cache, as are vod segments. The CDN does the caching. The client should keep segments around if you're doing rewind, but that's a client thing.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First of all, BitTorrent clients do not download in random order or wait 5 minutes. They usually download the rarest block first, but can do whatever they want, whenever they want. The problem here is that BT works so well because the clients default to "good behavior" (prioritize rare pieces first) and discourages "bad behavior" (leeching/no upload). This tilts the balance on the whole enough to maintain the healt…
With streaming, the service provider is generally also controlling the clients, so they should be much better off when it comes to client behavior. In case of bring-your-own-client, the incentives are exactly the same: Clients would likely default to good behavior as network health equals user experience, and exactly like BitTorrent there will be neither punishment nor need for it if some clients disobey.
In video streaming the client really controls everything...unless you have your own client and customize its behavior.
You should see how people try and get HLS to pick a stream. With the default players it's not possible - the client does it.