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Mercora - New Radio P2P Network
jtids writes "The maker of P2P Client, Shareaza, is working
on a new Radio P2P project called Mercora.
This network gives users the ability legally webcast
music to other users on the network. Users can also share images, send instant
messages, and join groups where they can participate in forums and chatrooms.
Although the program itself is still in beta, the project looks promising."
Mercora, a derivation of a Latin word meaning "to trade" and is run by Chief Executive Srivats Sampath, former CEO of McAfee.com
Wired ran an article on this last year here.
If you are running linux, bsd, mac or anything but windows you're out of luck there is only a windows client. I don't care enough to get this working under wine.
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doesn't that depend on what you broadcast?
I thought it was ruled a year or so back that all webcasts have to pay royalties to the artists if they boradcast the music over the net. How can this be legal if that is still the case?
roche
Bah Humbug!
I thought free internet died with the proverbial dot com fallout.. it will be interesting to see the sustainability of this project. This might also hurt online radio like shoutcast.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
legality is based on country of origin and content broadcasted, not the technology
Would this basically suck up all of the upstream bandwidth, so that basically the quality would suck, or you have an audience of 4.
Hopefull now everyone will be able to listen to Howard Stern again,
I remember that webcast sites (in essence indexes to internet radio stations) were attacked by the BIG R sometime back...anybody have an update on that?
It seems streaming MP3/RealAudio(lower quality ofcourse) would be the next way to share music, what with Kazaa etal becoming extinct. Ofcourse, Bittorrent, and these webcast stations have the same problem - they need to have an index page to publicize the tracker/links.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Sounds like Konspire2b, but not open source, and only for windows.
Besides, the guy who wrote konspire is also the guy who wrote MUTE, so I think he knows a thing or two about P2P.
From the Gentoo desktop of Luke Harman
All rights reserved of the producer and of the owner of the recorded work reserved. Unautorised Copying, Public performance, Broadcasting, Hiring or rental of this recording is prohibited
APublic. (noun)
1. The community or the people as a whole.
2. A group of people sharing a common interest: the reading public.
3. Admirers or followers, especially of a famous person. See Usage Note at collective noun.
now IANAL but it seems pretty clear to me its illegal
It seems like warez channels have been doing this forever. Once someone gets something, it spends a few days getting passed around all the high-bandwidth providers before it goes to the "public."
I'm glad to see more legal, but free (as in beer) music available. But how long before someone writes a "MyTunes" (or something similar) that allows you to download music (illegally, I'd imagine), off of this service?
Most *nix users can't configure ALSA correctly
You share pictures on Mercora right from your local directory on your computer. You "tell" the Mercora client about which pictures you want to share and with whom (people on your friends list, etc.) and those pictures can then be viewed by those people when you are both online on the Internet. People who have the permission to view your pictures will also have the ability to download those pictures.
Hmmm...look--somene is sharing Harry_Potter_the_Everlasting_MoneyMill.jpg.
This should be interesting.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The website gives you the impression that you can webcast the files you have to your friends. However, the restrictions on this (to be legal) make it basically useless to how the majority of people would use this anyway. Read below for the restrictions:
You are not allowed to do any of the following things:
* Publish advance program guides or use other means to pre-announce when particular sound recordings will be streamed or the order in which they will be streamed (this is because we are a non-interactive webcasting service)
* Webcast specific sound recordings within one hour of the request by a listener or at a time designated by the listener
* Webcast audio content for which you do not have the legitimate legal rights for use (music you have ripped from CDs that you own or music you have downloaded from a legitimate online music store like Apple iTunes is considered legitimate, music downloaded using file-sharing programs like KaZaA are not legitimate)
I've tried PeerCast before -- neat idea, but it simply isn't practical -- not many people have enough bandwidth to relay a 128kbps stream realiably, and every time I tried it I got nothing but stuttering and skipping.
How is this different from PeerCast? I glanced at the Web site, and didn't see anything that was revolutionary -- looks like PeerCast combined with IRC to me.
Though, perhaps they have fixed the problems PeerCast seems to have with bandwidth -- I've used it off and on, but it seems to always suffer from lag. Perhaps that would go away if there were more users, or perhaps it's just inherent in the design of the network -- I've never bothered to look at the technical details.
Anyway, I think the more exposure Webcasting has, the better. More variety, smaller players that can appeal to niche audiences, and lack of corporate interests playing to the lowest common denominator for the highest advertising profits are all advantages Webcasting has over traditional, ClearChannel-dominated radio. At the moment, at least. :-)
The network is nice, I admit I use it myself but its not new technology. This also is not a new network because I've been using it for a while. I don't know why this site decides to post this to the top of the page when other P2P news far more important is not posted.
Did you know MUTE developer Jason Rohrer will be speaking at the 5th International Free Software Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil?
View some slides Slide1
and notes Slide2
Lets also not forget that Shareaza is open source now.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Can you get pr0n off it?
At this point there is giant void between 'hobby' P2P webcasting solutions like this and PeerCast and P2P-Radio (http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/) and the professional applications like Abacast, ChainCast and the others. The hobbyist applications fail to deliver the counting tools needed for us to report our listenership numbers appropriately to ASCAP, BMI and the others and still have some flaws in terms of functionality. The proprietary options have these tools available but they are currently not much of a savings compared to the traditional bandwidth options.
What's needed is something like Shoutcast which provides a professional means of distribution, but built on a P2P architecture. To my knowledge that simply doesn't exist, but I have my fingers crossed. As a new webcaster who sees his listenership growing week after week, there may come a time when I can no longer afford to be popular without a REAL P2P webcast solution.
-pjc
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
More interesting would be tuning in to a station (or a category of stations), lets say classic rock and using a plugin that rips the streams to disk and checks for duplicates. Run it for a few days and you have a nice [category here] collection. This has already been done with Shoutcast, so we might as well adapt to new technology! The RIAA doesn't really care about this happening with FM radio, because the quality is sub-par, but if a web station is streaming at 160kpbs or greater...
...seeing as this is from the same guys who made Shareaza, which is the very likely the best P2P app out there right now. It's the first one where I didn't have to fight the program to get it to do what I wanted, it's rather user friendly, has undetectable amounts of bloat (by me, anyways), and installs a total of 0 third party programs (= spyware). And now version 2.0 is open source. :).
So I'd be inclined to expect good things from them
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.