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RSS And BitTorrent, Together At Last
eoyount writes "Wired has an interesting story about a really simple idea I wish I had thought of. Transferring large files across the Internet isn't easy for your average joe, but a combination of RSS and BitTorrent technology might just make it easier - Slashdot ran a previous story on the theoretical blending last year." (LegalTorrents is run by the strangely familiar simoniker, who wrote a short piece on the O'Reilly Network about how it was set up, and offers observations on how well the combination fares.) Update: 03/17 21:45 GMT by T : Ernest Miller submits two related postings he's written on RSS+BitTorrent, a combination he calls "broadcatching."
Many ISPs and college campuses block P2P ports, BitTorrent included. I'm not sure that 'news' is a compelling enough reason to have many (or any) of them change their policies.
Trolling is a art,
This sounds like a wonderful melding of two current technologies...
However, remember when cable gained enough steam to warrant not one but many 24hr cable news networks? We are now blessed with an overabundance of crappy sensationalist "reporting". I do NOT want cnn/msnbc/fuxnews/etc. landing on my HD.
If an individual set up a feed for say, a favorite game or movie alone, I would subscribe. But most webpages I read, I gloss over quickly then am done with.
If I, and everyone else had subscribtions to all of the media content of their favorite websites delivered autonomously, the majority of it getting thrown out quickly...
think of the bandwith, the poor helpless bandwith, won't somebody please think of the child., er bandwidth!?
...but in that case, you're no worse off than before. And realistically, if there's some huge download I'll usually just start it before I head to bed. Of course, if you're sitting there counting down the seconds until it's done, that's different...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, because if someone downloading a 100MB patch uploads even 10 MB during their BT session and closes it right after it's downloaded, that's still 10 MB the main servers don't have to send. Take Blizzard for example. Right now, their company's servers have to send 100% of the patch files. With BT, if they can cut that to 50% or even 80%, that's a huge benefit.
When you don't think of it in terms of people uploading movie files, and think in terms of companies using the technology to ease load on their web servers, now you're looking at BT the way the author intended!
Nice attempt at a troll, but by using BitTorrent at all, you are uploading. (Either that, or you want us to believe that you use a hacked client that will download at a screaming rate of 0.1k per second, max.) P.S. You take a greater risk of death every time you step in a car than you run a risk of being sued when you upload a file in Kazaa.
The best thing about this idea is that it plays right into the strength of bittorrent - namely, having a large number of people trying to get the same content at the same time. Since everyone will get the RSS feed at roughly the same time, there will be a large number of peers to share the load for bittorrent.
The funny thing is, I ran into Andrew the other day, and he was just gushing about this new idea he had! I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. Guess I missed my chance to post a story on slashdot.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
You seem to believe that 'corporations' should pay whatever it takes to upgrade their servers and bandwidth in order to give you decent download times for free. Heh. If BT lets me get fast download times at the cost of using some of my mostly idle upload bandwidth, I think its a great idea.
As for ISPs metering bandwidth, guess what, you have to pay for what you use anyway, otherwise the ISP doesn't stay in business. It doesn't matter whether its metered or a fixed $30 or $60 / month. It has to cover their costs. If you're complaining that your cost would go up with metering, its because you think that you use a lot more bandwidth then everyone else. So you're just trying to shift the costs to the people that don't use as much. Pot, meet kettle.
True multicast could help, too. But seeing as cable companies cleverly bought the routers you use (unless you're in academia or the military or both), they're just NOT going to turn on multicast routing any time soon, unless more people are aware of the possibilities and start leaning on them HARD.
"I could wake up in the morning and find the latest recordings from my favorite band loaded into my portable MP3 player, and just pick it up and go."
I don't understand where they are coming from here. If I am going to pay to download music, which consists of relatively small files, I am not going to run a BT to help out an online music store.
When they start mentioning uses so far off the base of reality, the whole article starts to smell of BS. Especially since the slowest part of the MP3 experience tends to be copying music from the PC to the player.
Typically, I load new tracks on my ipod before leaving in the morning. I'll tag the stuff, then transfer it before I hop into the shower. As far as downloading goes, I can download a whole CD of music in ~10 minutes. The only way the article's method would be worth doing would be if you invested in huge libraries of online music purchases daily.
On that note: Please quit looking to solve problems that don't exist.
There's a big difference between a manual BitTorrent download (which is what you are talking about) and an automated download in the middle of the night. If your RSS reader is doing the download then it can simply be coded to not stop sharing as soon as the download is finished; voila, no more problem.
What I believe is that the proposed trend of shifting upstream bandwidth expenditures to the client is a fundamentally inefficient strategy in the long term. For example, cable modems are ill-equipped to return as much as they take, and if a sizeable number of individuals actually attempted to do so the response time for everybody goes down the tubes and ultimately ISP rates get hiked or accounts pulled. I for one do not intend to get a T1 line simply because you do not feel like paying directly for the bandwidth you use on your favorite websites.
(Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why is this interesting? Why is metered access such a bad thing? So long as it is reasonably priced (and ensuring that there is an adequate choice of providers should accomplish this), metered access isn't a bad thing. Sure, it sucks for all those 1337573R5 downloading gigs of ISOs every night, but for everyone else who subsidizes their connections with high monthly fees, the current system sucks. I would love to be able to go out of town for a month and have my bandwidth bill be nothing (or close to that.)
If there's anything we should be pushing for is cheaper synchronous connection speeds. Why should a cable provider offer 3+MB download speeds but enforce an artificial cap of 128k to create a rather arbitrary distinction between residential and business services? Charge me for my upload usage, charge me for my download usage, but price it reasonably and allow me to pick a reasonable bandwidth that fits my needs.
Oh, and ISPs eat nothing right now. They get paid by the content providers to send content to consumers and by consumers to get content from the providers. Shifting the bandwidth to the consumer only shifts the burden to the unmetered end. This is good for both consumers and content providers in as much as content can be distributed for less money...the ISPs actually make less money on content distributed with BT. If we start seeing metered internet access, BT will basically go away since most of us don't want to pay for someone else's downloads.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Large amounts?
Can someone is can make subtitles near to or exceeding professional quality ones for free? Translating, editing, timing, and typesetting? They can and they do. That is why fansubs exist. Do they bother with sound? No, because dubs are very difficult to get even close to comparable with the original language, if at all, but subs are easy and require only a little quality control. In fact, the original producers would be wise to cultivate and sponsor these international volunteers to do the the translations and editing for them (because timing and typesetting are the most technical parts but can be applied to all the translations). Plus, unlike sound subtitles require a negligible amount of bytes compared to the video.
Can someone distribute content for essentially no cost to the producer? Perhaps you ought to read the article again. Obviously the answer is yes. This is why digital fansubs are far more widespread and popular than the old VHS variety ever was. This is why the parent of this thread was referring to articles that describe how indy bands and movies can make themselves known and spread their work.
Are international menus hard/expensive to make? No, unless you make it difficult for yourself in the first place. Frankly, I'm really only interested in watching the show, and a lot of the overly flashy and slow menus out there only make things annoying. Do you even need menus for online distribution? No, since generally it's just a single movie/song/album/file. How about packaging? No.
What about when electronic distribution is not available, i.e. poor countries? Well, those guys on the blankets on the sidewalks seem to be able to manage. Certainly I've seen a few bootlegs from Hong Kong in my time with laugably bad english but probably decent chinese, and they manage. In both cases they seem to be catering to people who are priced completely out of the legitimate market rather than simply unable to access it due to a lack of translation. Which is where black markets have always taken over.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
If Intel were Comcast, 15 years ago Intel would have said, "Quit hogging cycles. We didn't intend the 286 for raytracing, if you want to do raytracing buy a Cray."
So long as there is competition in the market for bandwidth, providers will upgrade their equipment every now and then, after subscriptions have paid off the previous generation of equipment. If there is no competition, you're going to see a stagnant level of service for ever-inflating prices (see Cable TV).
If I take a knife and I cut someone up with it. Does that mean that somehow you are now going to be unable to go use the knife for something you want/need to?
Honestly, if the only thing on this planet that anyone used bittorrent for was "warez", *GASP* you could still set up torrents for legal files and have all your buddies download them.
If BT becomes illegal at some point, then we all are going to have a lot more to worry about then the fact that we can't get ahold of our warez.
./revolution
Here's a gentle introduction to the BT/RSS concept that I wrote in December:
(from http://scottraymond.net/archive/4745)
- RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo.
Steve Gillmor wrote about BitTorrent and RSS and how they could be combined to create a "disruptive revolution." He's half right. RSS and BT are indeed two great tastes that taste great together, but Gillmor's vision is upside down: we shouldn't use BitTorrent to carry RSS, we should use RSS to carry BitTorrent. Let me explain.
But first, some background.
RSS (RDF Site Summary) is a simple format for syndicating content on the web. These days, the most common application of RSS is subscribing to weblogs: you tell your computer to check an RSS file for changes every so often, and then it notifies you when there's something new to read. If you're like me and you read one metric shitload of news every day, this is a life-saver.
BitTorrent, the brainchild of Bram Cohen, is the current cool-kids' P2P program. It works sort of like Kazaa, but at a lower level. It doesn't handle searching for new files, it doesn't have a media player, it just concentrates on downloading big files efficiently.
Okay. Two solutions in search of a problem. Here's a problem:
- I have a weakness.
I am addicted to the show Alias. I watched the first couple episodes of season two as it aired, and I was hooked. In my honest moments, I'll admit that the show's appeal is mostly due to the callipygian Jennifer Garner. It's a weakness; we deal.
But it gets worse. I go out on Sunday nights, when Alias airs, and I don't want to give that up. That's why God created the VCR, I know, but to compound the problem, I don't have TV. I don't want to have TV, because I love the feeling of superiority that I get by not having it.
This system is at tension, it has no rest, its forces are unbalanced, it wants to be resolved.
A partial answer.
The internet, it turns out, is great at resolving different kinds of tensions, and this is one of them. After a few weeks of missed episodes, I realized that with a little patience, a P2P program like Kazaa was able to fetch back-episodes with aplomb. Each file is around 450 megs, fairly high-quality video, with commercials cut out. I start a few episodes downloading, and by the next evening, they're ready to watch, whenever I have the time.
After a few weeks of enjoying this, a new tension emerged: I had caught up with all of the old episodes, and I had to wait a week for each new one. The problem is that the Kazaa protocol isn't especially well-tuned for getting brand new files: first someone has to record the show as it airs, cut out the commercials, and compress it to a reasonable size, then seed it on the network. Then, it has to slowly propagate to its peers, each transfer taking hours. It might take three days before it's available on enough peers that I'm able to even find it, let alone download it.
BitTorrent to the rescue.
The solution is BitTorrent. BitTorrent operates on similar principles to Kazaa, but it's tuned differently: it excels at downloading files that are new or currently in high demand. It breaks large files into many small chunks, and coordinates their assemblage, so that users can tap into a swarm and distribute the load evenly. At the same time that you're downloading a chunk, another user is downloading an earlier chunk from you -- no one server is overwhelmed, and the more popular a file, the higher its availability is. It's perfect for large files that are most interesting when they're fresh -- in other words, it's perfect for TV shows.
In many cases, I have been able to use BitTorrent to completely download a new TV show mere hours after the show airs. Like a TiVo user, I'm no longer bound to a specific time to watch my shows. I'm free to go out on Sunday night and still watch my show while it's brand new. TV is now asynchronous.
- Life is good.
But it could be bet