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P2P Internet Radio
fdsa writes "O'Reilly's openp2p.com has
an article
describing two programs for peer-to-peer audio streaming, Streamer and PeerCast. Streamer is currently Windows-only but GPLed, and desperately searching
for somebody to port it to Linux. PeerCast was on slashdot before, but now runs on Linux and supports Ogg Vorbis. There's an impressive list of channels already. Planned features include video streaming and a "tip jar" system for paying artists. Setting up your own station is as simple as installing the oddcast
winamp plugin or liveice for xmms."
While a treatment of security is obviously part of the "tip jar" model, I don't think that P2P networks have evolved enough yet to be easily graftable with actual money transfer. The scheme described uses GPG to sign the payment information so that middlemen can't insert their own paypal account for someone else's song (hmm... does this remind anyone of the earlier story about Kazaa hijacking affiliate payments?) but the authentication is through a "web of trust" which, frankly, is a poor excuse for security when actual money is being thrown around. If I'm going to drop a quarter in the jar, I'm going to make damn sure that some script kiddie isn't tapping it.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Notice that every single story title on the mainpage contains at least one acronym. Are we using jargon to keep our little club elite?
Here is the cache of it on Google. :)
With cable modem and DSL upstream bandwidth of, for the most part, 128kbps or, rarely, 256kbps, is peer-to-peer media streaming really a viable option?
In streaming audio from webcasters, I always tend to use the 128kbps streams, simply because they sound much better than the alternative 64/56kbps streams. I suspect many others find their streaming audio experiences to be quite the same, in this respect. Thus, a 128kbps cable/DSL user would be limited to one outgoing stream, and even this is contingent upon the user not doing anything else with his/her bandwidth at the time.
The summary notes that there are plans, also, for video streaming. This simply cannot be accomplished with decent quality, even with the best codecs current on the market, under such conditions.
World economies are just now getting used to having broadband available to ordinary people, and I don't see the availability of a T1 to every household happening any time soon.
For peer-to-peer file sharing, downloading a file at 0.5kBps is acceptable, but I certainly wouldn't want to stream media at that sort of a rate. I do like the idea of peer-to-peer streaming media, but I simply don't think the market is ready for it, yet.
Yet in that same article, they admit that the system is a way to get around webcasting royalties. This is just silly, as an artist who wants their work to be heard far and wide can offer it up for royalty-free webcasting. Similarly, there are quite a few artists who have placed free, legal mp3s of some of their songs up on the web.
I really wish people wouldn't try and hide behind the rhetoric of trying to help the artists, when some of the artists don't want their copyrights forcibly violated. Personally, I support P2P as a means of circumventing bandwidth limitations, but not as a means of hiding liability when infringing copyright.
(And while I'm up on the soap box, I also disagree with trying to directly compensate the artist for intellectual property that they've sold the rights to. I support more equitable recording contracts, but I also support the right of an artist to contractually sell his/her ownership of song rights in exchange for money. By insisting on tipping the artist at the same time as infringing on copyright, you're eroding the artists' ability to sell that copyright, regardless of whether or not it was a fair deal.)
Proliferation of Internet radio will be one possible way to fund the "lighting" of all the unlit fiber the telecom companies laid under the ground in the last boom. I'm not looking forward to the bandwith crunch or increased rates which may occur prior to the next expansion, but internet radio, could be a small contributor to the next wave of bandwith improvements. I consider all the stations but the ones I'm listening to to be bandwidth hogs.
Ross Youngblood
Too bad that Hollywood hacking story has no acronym.Nice try though dumbass!
Where's the source, Luke?
Unselfish actions pay back better
Funnily enough I wrote my first live mp3 streaming system back in '97 - in the days before any players supported http streaming. So I hacked on the mp3serv daemon so that you could recieve a stream and send it to stdout. I never disabled the rebroadcast code so my first few braodcasts ended up with a few listeners who were automatically rebroadcasting....
;-) So I ended up hacking bits of icecast for a while before abandoning my PhD on killer asteroids to work for internet music companies.
It would have been revolutionary to actually index the rebradcasters, but I guess my astronomy got in the way and it never happened.
It was about 18 months later that Slashdot put up a headline about the release of shoutcast - 'live mp3'.... You know me... been there, done that etc
Anyway.... Now that napster has imploded I'm looking for a job in the bay area - given my groundbreaking work on mp3 radio and p2p networks there must be someone out there with a job for me right?????
Peace PPL
What is Winamp?
I'm one of the people who's supposed to be concerned about this kind of thing. I'm a musician. I produce sounds as art, and I write songs which are copyright to me. You'd think I'd be like 'whoa, slow down' with this stuff, the p2p.
Here's why I'm not.
Music has long been an avenue for social commentary. From 'What's Going On' to 'For What It's Worth' and 'Ohio', not to mention stuff like Tom Lehrer's 'So Long, Mom' and 'Who's Next?', it's been a way to put across a perspective using art. It doesn't have to be really detailed- in fact, art that's really specific that way tends to suck, polemical to the extent that it's haranguing you. Some of the best art with political importance has been, like 'For What It's Worth', relatively vague. It paints a compelling picture in little words, the details can be filled in by real dialogue. It's about using music to open someone's mind to the POSSIBILITY of dialogue.
Now currently in the USA, we literally have the authorities shutting down communications on the grounds of 'supporting terrorist activities'. These are the same people who spent government money to drape a statue tit- they are not oblivious to art, they are just determined to make it behave. We're now looking at a situation where it is a real concern- it wouldn't be much of a jump to see these guys categorize dissident art and music as 'aid to terrorists', and to see them methodically expunge it from the Internet wherever they find it.
That's where it starts to get on my turf. I'm an American- 34, grew up middle class, normally you would think I would get to produce whatever art or music I wanted. Maybe. But the spectacle of a manufactured war with Iraq so appalls me (hell, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff are against it too, I don't think I'm alone there) that I can't sit around experimenting with instrumental music anymore.
Like I said in an earlier post, I've cut a recent song, "Blood on the Sand", directly about the Iraq situation. I wrote it hardcore and kept it as simple as I could, I played it hardcore until I had blisters on my fingers, I mixed it and put it out, and now by Bush's own rules I'm aiding the terrorists- because if it's gotta be 'us vs. them' and 'us' means what he's doing, NO WAY am I getting behind that, and that makes me 'them' and yeah, I'm trying to support the point of view against this Iraq overthrow.
How does that relate to streaming p2p? I would think it was obvious but the point can't be made too often. We are in a situation RAPIDLY approaching suppression of political dissidents. Already the government is shutting down web sites on political grounds- you cannot so openly express your support for those the government considers active enemies. How far away is the next step, suppressing stuff that doesn't actively support the government? That's where the rising tide begins to drown me- I don't specifically support anyone the government considers terrorists, but I can't condemn them as blindly as I'm asked to. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, considered the birthplace of American Revolution, and now I have to wonder whether the desperation shown by those New England patriots is now echoed somewhere in the Middle East- and even to think such thoughts is less and less permitted.
I am unfamiliar with firing a gun, and I am unfamiliar with hand to hand combat. In a war, in a revolution, I'm not that much use to some things. But I'm an artist- and when I can no longer hide and entertain myself with purposeless artistic stuff, my art becomes my weapon, and the harder I work the better a weapon it becomes. It's my only recourse.
So, I view all forms of p2p as samizdat- on the one hand, organizations like the RIAA consider they have ownership of a lot of art and their grounds for suppressing its communication is on the grounds that it's their property. It's important to remember that the government can consider art's content as grounds for suppressing it- we're 90% there already. At that point, p2p (including streaming) can be the only method for suppressed ideas to get a hearing. Doesn't mean the ideas will all be good or worthy- but to somebody expressing ideas in danger of being suppressed, p2p is hugely important.
Like me. And I could go farther- and may have to if my conscience so demands, and it comes around with a song that needs to be heard.
So, more p2p, please! :D
Chris Johnson
Actually I think P2P networks need to be more concerned with bandwith caps & quotas than anything else. Streaming media limited by bandwith, while quickly eating up your quota. Filesharing,streaming audio & video. What good is a distributed architecture if the last mile can be squeezed by companies that not only are carriers, but media empires as well? The legal schenanigans is simply a kicking the butt to add to the squeeze to the sides, with a dead end in front. Bandwith managment by the user only brings to the front who really controls the situation. And it's not who you wish it was.
so I went to his site and read his "hey you just have to know sockets" promise. Uh uh. The code is FULL of win32isms. Little things like the slash going the wrong way in #includes, bigger things like no #ifdefs around winsock code. Probably a good few days work with testing. It is GPL and he is willing to accept help though. Just be prepared for the worst (-:
d00d, we're all unemployed, too!
Legal, unlicensed radio, using wireless lan technology.
:-)
I.E. use a customised version of UDP across wireless lan, to 'broadcast', and people with laptops running a program to detect these packets get notified of your station when they walk past your office
It would be like pirate radio, but there would be no danger of interference with other services, so the only issue would be with content, (I.E. paying royalties for the muzak played).
As an aside, can anyone explain what happened to IP multicast technologies on the internet router hardware level? They've kind of been pushed to the side with the whole P2P thing, when they could have been a much better solution to problems like streaming music and video.
hot beefy manchode up my smelly asshole
smelly hot manchode
The parent post is hardly "flame bait." The reality is that this current incarnation of the Internet radio idea will fail.
Once they release the source, then all piracy bets are off since it's trivial to permanently store any song received. If they don't release the source, then no one will use it, because someone will come up with an alternative.
It is, however, a great way to waste network bandwidth by transmitting low quality sound.
It's clearly a better idea to have any song locally cached rather than using Internet bandwidth. In addition, the download of any song can be done in the background with an adequate bitrate.
Geesh...
when we're required to posses a computer license to access the internet? the internet superhighway, policed for violators of certain things, just like drivers are policed in the physical world. first, they get their foot in the door by claiming their presence is to go after the most horrible aspects of society, child molesters, and terrorists. And then when they've established themselves to police those things, it is not much of a financial or technical challange to start going after other things. And then the business world can find ways of increasing profit margins by forming partnerships with those authorities, much like how the insurance companies are deeply bedded with the department of transportation to create novel ways of writing more traffic tickets. And by that time, another part of the world has changed into something we are no longer free to move about in.
Front row seats to the unravelling of a free society.
Guess who does the Lion's share of "reasearch" for the department of transportation? A web of non-profits and institutes with insurance leaders sitting at their boards. Pick your favorite government office and you'll probably find similar "non-profits" doing their research for them too.
Is the NHTSA recommending Judge shopping and jury tampering?
Who does the "research" and writes reports like these for them?
there are similar "non-profits" that have over 20 areas of the government as clients, giving God knows what sort of recommendations.
I miss retard Chou.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Judge shopping, etc
one node in the web of these special non-profits
Why is this relevant or even on-topic? Because it wil be this exact sort of machinery and framework that will be used on the internet. The same methods. They will conduct "research" and lawmakers will use that information as a basis for making decisions just as the NHTSA has done, and the NHSTA, a government agency, literally uses the words "judge shopping" intheir recommendations they've gotten by proxy of one of these non-profits.
they play pretty dirty, don't they? you just wait, that same judge shopping and jury tampering advice will be given to the prosecutors who come after you for file sharing.
The title says it all, just why is this thing so grand if it has zero stations, eh ? Installed it on a generic Windoze box, it doesn't make any messages from the firewall .
Be sure to drop by the Streamer Forums and tell us what's on your mind.
--this is a fantastic effort and development, and is truly one of the ways to beat the incredible high cost of bandwith and the dumb way of doing live streaming, ie, having a central server with a huge amount of fat pipes. I just this week started playing with streamcastp2p, but from the angle of people on slow modems and for low bitrates. So far the emphasis is on high bitrates and broadband, which is successful for the people doing it. The developers there have been very friendly and helpful in trying to get me up and streaming (howdy guys). So far no joy at the lower rates-this is mostly my fault I bet-, but I am assured this is happening, I'm just a noob windows lamer coming from a mac classic background, and now a smidgen of linux, and struggling with it still, but I know it's possible. I certainly hope some of ya'all ubergeek coders can help them out getting it ported to linux and mac soon and help with ogg as well. The compression codecs(to me anyway) are a big problem, mp3 is just slap fulla uncertainty now and license fees, etc.
--previous comment was on streamerp2p, this one on peercast. I just downloaded it, all the channels I see require a broadband connection so there's no way to even try it out, I think the minimum showing was 40's something kbs, not good for modem users, especially if they want to share. In addition, now it won't turn off and the uninstall button doesn't work, at least for me it didn't, and the icon is sitting in the tray and is unresponsive. This was the windows download, if any of the developers are reading this.
Yes, I know, use linux. I Plan on it after newer ocher chapeau is released, I am 99% gui and 1% cli type person, just the way it is. I will learn cli at my speed, so it has to be a fully functional gui version to start with. I liked previous versions linux I tried, looking forward to a more standardized and stable gui linux version, which from what I have been reading it is.
I just tried Streamer, which is a really cool idea. It's got A LOT of refining to do, but it does work...But the highest quality stream I could find was 64kbps, and it sounded like shit.
Either get support from the Winamp folks for streaming from multiple sources, or create your own built in player.
I suppose there would be issues with sync-ing the multiple sources - but nothing that couldn't be overcome (buffer all the streams until the slowest one catches up)
-CySurflex
How many wonderful peer to peer systems are just pale imatations of MBONE?
IF ISPs get their act together and switch on MBONE then broadband users will have their killer app. Like OO and GUI do we have to wait twenty years for this technology to be widespread?
--well, based on your recommendation, I just looked at streamaudio. I clicked over to the getting started page. It's 400$ a MONTH plus they want to know what expensive pipes you have. A t-1 costs around 800 clams where I live, plus paying for the install. Even getting adsl is super expensive, several hundred for them to come out and "install" it, then 80$ a month for minimal speeds. sdsl is higher cost, which you would want for streaming. This just ain't happening. Maybe I am missing saomething, but that's the numbers on that page for their service/software/whatever it is. Seems like for 400$ anyone could just get at least a fractional t-1 and use shoutcast maybe, something like that. Sorry, outta my economic ballpark right now. Good luck to you and them, my interest will be focused on the *free* or *much cheaper* other ways of doing p2p live sharing.
--there still remains a hardcore bushbot blinders on presence, but frankly, most of the true honest patriotic conservatives I know are completely disillusioned with bush and the CFR administration. For example, the adl-bushbots that run Freepers can't ban clear thinking independent conservatives fast enough. The klintonista-commies at DU can't ban free thinking freedom loving liberals fast enough. The patriot act, homeland gestapo, healthcare martial law act, etc has REALLY woken up the grassroots and they don't like what they are seeing. Basically what us independents have been preaching for years now, trust not either of the two major mafia gangster political parties, that choice is akin to choosing the crips or the bloods. Really, that's it in a nutshell, and millions on both sides of the political fence are waking up to it. Pick an honest constitutional law-oriented third party or go completely independent. There's a lot of common ground with freedom loving peoples in general, both domestically and around the world, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater is my advice, and don't get trapped into one of those 2 herinous corporate political parties, the D's and R's, that only exist to share the loot and spoils from raping the nation. Think globally, act locally, and take back control of your own destiny. Freedom will be won or lost in this era we are in now. And freedom does NOT equate the Democratic or Republican party, the "UN", or global corporate blood profits fascists. /rant
this P2P streaming stuff is old news. Allcast has been shipping p2p broadcasting software for two years, and their patents in the area go back much further. these chuckleheads profiled in O'reilly's article are way behind the curve, and if their businesses evolve they'll wind up in court with their pants down.
Can't understand why it was marked flaimbait either.
There is one reason to listen to internet radio: it's a great way of finding out different types of music and new artists and remixes that you wouldn't find out about on your own.
Besides, I use Kazaa but I still listen to the normal radio!!! Why wouldn't I?
Also, when listening to a 45kbps OGG broadcast the sound quality is very good.
Hey all. Anything to help struggling musicians like myself. Cut out the Record companies and get music to the people for wayyy less. Just clean up any bugs programers and I'm happy. Slashdoters do your thing and help the cause!
Except for Great Britain. According to ISO 9166 and Internet reality
Great Britain's toplevel domain should be _gb_. Instead, Great Britain
and Nortern Ireland (the United Kingdom) use the toplevel domain _uk_.
They drive on the wrong side of the road, too.
-- PERL book (or DNS and BIND book)
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