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Calling All Broadcasters

blog.bittorrent.com

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Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#41

Post by chimeracoder »

kzahel wrote: post #15
jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

I never understood why torrent clients are not built into browsers and the defacto means of download. Would be huge cost savings.

Opera has (had?) one built in. The difficulty is the necessity of hashing the entire file. Torrents are great for snapshots of large files. I think one of the reasons the torrent protocol is not built-in is that it's simply more complicated and the user experience is not as good. Or perhaps it is because there is a certain stigma attached to using a technology that enables distribution of data, even when it is agains…

> I think one of the reasons the torrent protocol is not built-in is that it's simply more complicated and the user experience is not as good.

That's self-fulfilling - if it were built into the browser, there's no reason you'd really have to know.

(Presumably you wouldn't run into the "zero-seeders" problem if the servers acted as seeders - they're currently serving 100% of the file anyway (without torrenting), so torrenting would only reduce that.)

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#43

Post by ams6110 »

kzahel wrote: post #2

There's a lot of times that I'm watching something on YouTube that's broadcast live (like presidential debates) when I wish there was a less corporate, ad infested version where it was available. I think a P2P solution for events like this would be really cool. I've seen BitTorrent live evolve over the last few years and it's really beginning to mature. It still hasn't seen a swarm at that kind of scale, though.

Are you opposed in general to people earning money by providing you streaming content you're interested in, or would you prefer to pay for it directly rather than have ads?

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#44

Post by ams6110 »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

I never understood why torrent clients are not built into browsers and the defacto means of download. Would be huge cost savings.

BitTorrent is associated almost exclusively with piracy, and the protocol is actively blocked on many networks.

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#45

Post by ihsw »

kzahel wrote: post #33
mtgx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone create a WebRTC web app in this way, so one person can broadcast to millions through P2P technology? Or would the browser vendors need to make certain API's available before they can do that?

Once arbitrary data can be sent through peer connections via a browser javascript application, then there is no reason why the BitTorrent Live protocol (or some other similar P2P streaming protocol) could not work over WebRTC. One difficulty I see is actually getting the binary data into a element. It would be in theory possible to write to the file in the HTML5 FileSystem API and point the video element to it, but t…

It may be necessary to paint it via canvas, however that opens up a can of worms that completely bypasses the video element.

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#46

Post by batiudrami »

ams6110 wrote: post #44
jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

I never understood why torrent clients are not built into browsers and the defacto means of download. Would be huge cost savings.

BitTorrent is associated almost exclusively with piracy, and the protocol is actively blocked on many networks.

It also chokes networks - an open seeding torrent client significantly increases latency, even with the number of connections limited.

It's a problem we have in my house with Spotify, which utilises P2P to lower costs - it has a negative effect on anyone else who is gaming.

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#47

Post by bramcohen »

vitovito wrote: post #22

It's interesting that Bram (I assume it's still Bram's show over there) has finally gone with a new streaming-optimized protocol design. We argued about it years ago. Here's Bram in 2004 arguing that live streaming is a niche market: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/4294.html In the comments, "streamerp2p" is discussed, which I used as the basis for a proposal for live radio station streams along with Speex, back ~20…

A number of things have changed since I made that post. Streaming downloads are long since supported. Peoples's net connections are much faster than they used to be. Flash can be relied on to do playback. And I've just plain figured out a whole bunch of new techniques, reworking from the ground up, to actually get latency under control.

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#48

Post by doublec »

kzahel wrote: post #33
mtgx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone create a WebRTC web app in this way, so one person can broadcast to millions through P2P technology? Or would the browser vendors need to make certain API's available before they can do that?

Once arbitrary data can be sent through peer connections via a browser javascript application, then there is no reason why the BitTorrent Live protocol (or some other similar P2P streaming protocol) could not work over WebRTC. One difficulty I see is actually getting the binary data into a element. It would be in theory possible to write to the file in the HTML5 FileSystem API and point the video element to it, but t…

Possibly the MediaSource api, which allows writing to media elements: http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/m...

Re: Calling All Broadcasters

#50

Post by ZoFreX »

kzahel wrote: post #15
jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

I never understood why torrent clients are not built into browsers and the defacto means of download. Would be huge cost savings.

Opera has (had?) one built in. The difficulty is the necessity of hashing the entire file. Torrents are great for snapshots of large files. I think one of the reasons the torrent protocol is not built-in is that it's simply more complicated and the user experience is not as good. Or perhaps it is because there is a certain stigma attached to using a technology that enables distribution of data, even when it is agains…

Note to anyone planning on using Opera's client: it's terrible, out of spec, and banned on many bittorrent sites.

I don't think the complexity and user experience issues are completely intrinsic to the protocol - BitTornado (sadly, another client that misbehaves, and hasn't been updated in 6 years) was hands-down the easiest for less techy people to use and understand. (Each download has its own window and instance of the program, making it look and feel very similar to downloading in Internet Explorer)

Why do you say the difficulty is in hashing the entire file? BitTorrent divides the files into small chunks and hashes those, so downloading lots of small files vs downloading one big one doesn't make a lot of difference

(with a few caveats - some clients support an additional hash on each file, which can save you re-downloading data if two files share a block and only one is changed, and some clients add padding data so there is only one file per block. In practice, these are both very rare)

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