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Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

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Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#121

Post by KMag »

jpgvm wrote: post #96

I know there are a lot of people saying the breaking the rarest first rule will be really bad for swarm health but it seems to me that with the rise of faster connections it seems reasonable that you can stream a torrent, keeping a reasonable buffer of a few blocks and then with any spare bandwidth download the torrent with a standard rarest first strategy and seed whilst doing so. That said I think purely streaming…

See my other comment here about how I implemented randomized swarming in LimeWire in a way to still promote the health of the swarm, and suggestions for a smarter way than I implemented in LimeWire.

Even for someone who's interested only in leeching a single streamed movie, if the number of sources for some blocks is only one, it's still in their rational best interest to request those single-source blocks first. Also, if there are multiple blocks with only one source, and they assume there may be another user using the same algorithm, it's in their rational self-interest to download earlier blocks, but not always the next one, under the assumption that another leecher may be grabbing the same block at the same time.

So, you end up with the probability of selecting rarest-first vs. earliest-first as a smooth function of the number of sources for the rarest block, and when picking amongst rarest blocks, using something close to an exponential distribution. The best solution for the health of the network would be selecting uniformly from the rarest chunks, but that discourages people from participating in the swarm. Rational self-interest can lead to a solution that's still better for the collective than a pure earliest-first chunk request strategy. (And yes, in LimeWire, I did implement chunk selection as a Strategy design pattern.)

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#122

Post by mikegerwitz »

stegosaurus wrote: post #82

This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined. Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have ac…

> Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body.

Not said enough; thank you.

There was outrage (rightfully so) over DRM on videos and music, because it handcuffed the user, and it prevented legitimate and legal activities like moving music to a new device.

The streaming situation is far more restrictive, but nobody seems to mind---not only do you have digital handcuffs on the stream itself, you have ephemeral media. And most people don't consider it as a problem, because the issues they traditionally had with DRM---such as copying to another device---no longer manifest; it's available _everywhere_. But when you stop paying for your account, or when the service disappears, you no longer have access to your media; you never did to begin with.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#123

Post by KMag »

KMag wrote: post #43
MoSal wrote: post #9

I'm deeply concerned about popularizing torrent streaming. A few leechers breaking "rarest-first" might not cause much harm. But if most leechers become streamers, torrents will lose their efficiency in distributing less-popular content. Transmission implemented a "streaming" feature once, that didn't actually stream. It just stopped fetching pieces "with the same rarity" randomly. They still got too much heat for ad…

Former LimeWire engineer here. I implemented randomized chunk selection for swarmed downloads in LimeWire. I think the proper swarmed streaming solution is to make the percentage chance of requesting the rarest chunk be a smooth function of the number of replicas of the rarest chunk. If the rarest chunk has only one source, the probability should be 1.0. If there are multiple chunks that are all the most rare, you pr…

Oh, and if the user was idle more than something like 5, 15, or 30 minutes, LimeWire would switch to random chunk requests regardless of MIME type, assuming the user didn't need a streaming download. I hope full-screen media players prevented the user from being counted as idle.

I vaguely seem to remember WMV and ASF also needing some information from footers in the file, and therefor also prioritizing the last MB of the file.

This was all implemented using the Strategy object oriented design pattern, to make it easier to play around with many alternatives and make specialized strategies for specific MIME types.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#125

Post by cbeach »

zdkl wrote: post #119
cbeach wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying its up to content makers to support every niche OS, otherwise niche OS users are entitled to steal their work?

I don't know what parent is saying, but my choice of software shouldn't be the concern of content distributors . It's their job to make content available after all. If they don't want my business, I'll take it elsewhere

That's exactly how capitalism should work. But for a moment there it sounded as if you were contemplating piracy, rather than taking your business elsewhere.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#126

Post by chayesfss »

bcook wrote: post #72
cbeach wrote: post #15

Dislike this kind of story appearing in HN. We're all well educated people with high earning potential who should be capable of buying movies, not using our talent to rip them off. I'd hate to see HN develop a bad reputation because of stuff like this.

I agree. I would expect the affluent to have a much more intelligent argument than "well... everyone else pirates (with differing levels of justification) and life goes on". Piracy is an alternative... not a solution.

what's the alternative if he's looking to stream from cli to vlc?

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#127

Post by Aleman360 »

sneak wrote: post #23

When are we as a community going to stop cheekily "tolerating" piracy and finally stand up against the unjust and immoral lie that is the concept of intellectual property rights? When you can tell me who owns the number two, I can tell you who owns a song. It's not just "I want movies without paying" posturing. Culture is reuse and remixing. Half of internet culture these days comes from V, from Tyler Durden, from Th…

> Creators should get paid, yes, but that does not warrant the current farce in any way whatsoever.

That's a huge issue that you're just sweeping under the rug.

Behind all creative material is someone's time, which is the most valuable thing any of us have.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#128

Post by regularfry »

ekianjo wrote: post #115
colinramsay wrote: post #5

This doesn't work for me, because http://thepiratebay.se is hardcoded in the code and that mirror is blocked in my location. I filed an issue. https://github.com/weslleyaraujo/pirateflix/issues/3

> This doesn't work for me, because http://thepiratebay.se is hardcoded in the code and that mirror is blocked in my location. I filed an issue. Can't you fix that with an entry in your /etc/hosts file ?

The way piratebay blocks are done round my neck of the woods, it's blocked at the IP layer, not just DNS. Hosts file hackery doesn't help.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#129

Post by jychang »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #122
stegosaurus wrote: post #82

This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined. Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have ac…

> Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Not said enough; thank you. There was outrage (rightfully so) over DRM on videos and music, because it handcuffed the user, and it prevented legitimate and legal activities like moving music to a new device. The streaming situation is far more restrictive, but nobody seem…

This comment is irrelevant to the topic at hand. Not only is this app (or any other torrent streaming app, including uTorrent and qBittorrent and PopcornTime) not have any DRM, you can use the fully downloaded file after you stream it. [1]

For non-torrent sources, streaming is not tied to DRM either. Most youtube videos are not flash based, but streamed MP4 files that aren't DRM'd in any way; you can get the MP4 file if you want. Service disruption is a problem, but there is always a trade off- and honestly, I'm more likely to lose a hard drive full of video files than Youtube is likely to disappear in the next 10 years.

[1] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5Q24UE0ptGU/TZiOmTxoHJI/AAAAAAAAAI... Here's a qBittorrent image for an example.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#130

Post by ultramancool »

bcook wrote: post #91
truebosko wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only viable way for me to purchase a large majority of shows my wife and I enjoy watching are to maintain a cable subscription, loaded with channels that I don't care about. I can't justify paying nearly $100 CAD / month. (We pay for Netflix, Spotify, and have used Google Play to buy episodes of certain shows)

You justify piracy because the legal method (having a cable subscription) is inconvenient?

Some people think about this way too morally - For most of us, morality never enters the equation, I just want to watch something, there's no "justification" it's just "how do I get the content?" in an absolutely utilitarian sense.
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