Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
No. The next bandwidth crunch comes when Microsoft gets more serious about buffer overflows and sends out 30Mbyte servicepacks to everybody again and again. Internet radio can't compete with that, and Microsoft has more buffer overflows than the RIAA has songs :-)