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."

Comments

Possible security issues

[Sneftel]

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.

"It's for the artists"

[Erasmus Darwin]

There's a quote in the article that bothers me: "But the two men both feel that their programs can help music artists get their work heard outside of traditional radio broadcasting."

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.)

Re:"It's for the artists"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I think Peercast is just trying to find a way of making p2p-sharing benefit artists. Not force them to use give up their copyrights.

What do you want to happen? the RIAA should eradicate P2P? the music industry should protect the artists with law suits against 15 year old kids sharing their music? Its not going to happen, so something like the Tip Jar has to work otherwise the artists will end up with nothing in a few years when the publishers go out of business.

Its precisely this kind of thinking that has got the entire music industry (yes I`m in the industry so I think I qualify to speak) into the mess it is in at the moment. Copyright in its current form just doesn`t work on the Internet. Either we change the copyright laws or we adapt to the times, I prefer the latter.

Bandwidth

[rossy]

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.

Re:Free?

[ViGe]

Where's the source, Luke?

Exactly. There's no way I'm going to put this kind of software to my machine without the source available. Not that I would read through the entire source if it was available, but the fact that it isn't makes me think they have something to hide. Perhaps it's a DDOS tool? Perhaps it gives them shell access to my computer?

They say they haven't had TIME to release the source! That's the lamest excuse I've ever heard!

multicast?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bandwidth Concerns

[jilles]

The whole point of p2p streaming is that you only serve one or two streams. I've used peercast a lot during the past two months and I can comfortably stream up to 100kbps using my DSL connection. Using ogg streams that means you I serve two 45 kbps streams that sound pretty good. People who tune into my peercast station propagate the streams to additional listeners.

The nice thing about peercast is that the peercast network is self organizing. If some client tunes in that does not serve up enough bandwidth, that client is bumped and moves to the edge of the network where he is no longer a problem. Consequently, reliability is pretty good if you have enough bandwidth to pass the streams on. I often tune in to streams and I have found that they are just as reliable as regular shoutcast streams.

Another nice thing is that it is in principle agnostic to the media being streamed. Right now it only works for ogg and mp3 but it is the intention to support additional streams in the future. Video streams require more bandwidth than audio but that is not a problem if there are enough clients with enough upload capacity to serve one or two streams. With my 128kbps upload capacity, high quality streams are not feasible for me currently. However there are plenty of people who do have the capacity to stream high quality video. Using peercast they can form a network without requiring a central server that serves a single stream for each viewer.

It will be interesting to see how peercast handles a second round of slashdotting. Last time was a bit to early but it has improved enormously since then.

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

--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.