Slashdot Mirror
Torrentocracy = RSS + Bit Torrent + Your TV
lerhaupt writes "I've started a project called Torrentocracy which is the combination of RSS, Bit Torrent and your Television. It's written as a plugin for MythTV (the homebrew Linux PVR project). This means you can not only easily find out about new torrents from various enclosure enabled blogs, but you can also start the torrent download process with the click of your TV remote control. Are RSS aggregators which support torrent downloads the next greatest thing since web browsers? What is the significance of hooking this directly to your TV? Here's a screenshot."
Except for the fact that I'll need to keep my television on 24 hours a day to seed.
You really should've torrented that .jpg.
;)
Just a thought.
Kthx.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Except for the fact that I'll need to keep my television on 24 hours a day to seed.
Aren't you doing that anyway?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The Interface needs to be as easy as digital cable. Otherwise i'd never use it. When I sit down in front of the TV I become a veg. Anything not easy is just plain to hard to do.
/.ed
Can't look at the screen shot though. been
Evolution or ID?
You should have set up a torrent and had people mirror the site.
Its a really good idea. But when your dealing with programs like bit torrent with its reputation for illicit downloads you're fighting an uphill battle to get any sort of mainstream interest.
Guy: Here's my new cool project on torrents and TV. :(
Slashdotters: Cool. (Click)(Click)(Click)
Slashdot: Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!! [[[[Crush]]]]
Server: (Dies)
Guy: Well now that you've killed my server... I guess my project can't continue.
Slashdot: Thanks for letting us know about your project.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
A lot of people take the problem from the other side, while trying to download movies on your TV, we prefer to watch tv on our PCs.
Where can I find this ? Is it a program ?
"I think we can handle one little jpg."
"No Lieutenant, your webserver is already dead."
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
have always failed to get complete large files.
/or had trouble getting torrent working efficiently. PAR's could help bring in the robustness that dumb users would need.
if this is to work on a television, maybe torrents should start to be paired with PAR files to create a far more robust method of fetching large files.
sure these might need to be seeded and torrent files too, but as the PAR files could be dramatically smaller (i.e. 15% of size depending on size of parity) than the full torrent file, they could be published on the sites of the copyright owner (in the case of legit works where the company is using torrents to save bandwidth).
simply put, user expectations when they use simple devices like a TV is that it just works... how many times have you NOT got a complete torrent and
just my 2c!
Next thing you know, Orrin Hatch will be introducing a bill to blow up your television every time you watch some bootleg show.
I don't even know what that means.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
They still make TV's?
If its from democracy then Slashdot just voted you out of office.
Filter bypass...
Filter bypass..
have you ever tried to search for ur favorite movie or distribution torrent on suprnova or torrentz.com? It always takes a long time to do and i dont know how easy it would be to search the RSS feeds for ur stuff using the remote and the tv.The click to download can happen later.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
In my understanding, ISPs are able to easily track torrent downloads do to the seeding algorithms. If torrents become more mainstream, people will have more protection in downloading them as there will be more for the governments to regulate.
Thoughts?
GroupShares Inc. - A completely free stock trading community!
-------
artlu.net
Torrents.co.uk also publishes an RSS feed of new shows, and has several links to auto-downloaders. These other downloaders don't bolt onto a PVR, which is a nice feature, but it is worth remembering that many trackers already have RSS feeds and there is _some_ software already out there.
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
I kept hoping no one would do this. I'd seen requests for something like it on mythtv-users. Now that MythTV will be indistinguishable from "Movie Pirates" in the MPAA's eyes. It's probably only a matter of time before the whole project gets litigated, albeit unjustly, into oblivion. Well I hope Isaac can file legal paperwork and code at the same time, but I'm guessing not. And don't bother telling me this is a separate plug-in for MythTV, I know that. What I'm saying here is that the MPAA's lawyers don't know or won't care.
Google has the front page of the site cached, in case no one sets up a mirror.
All rites reversed 2010
1. I thought torrents randomly sent chunks from all over the file, rather than as a stream. Wouldn't this make no sense unless you wanted to wait forever for the program to be completely downloaded ?
2. Given the large amount of copyrighted programs made available on torrent networks, isn't this an effort to make mainstream what might be otherwise illegal ? Does it make sense to put this amount of effort into support of what might be intended to be an illegal activity for most ?
I would have RTFA but its slashdotted, so I couldn't confirm for myself how torrents are an appropriate medium, and whether the issues of widespread support for copyright violations are addressed.
With the vast amount of legitimate downloads made available using BitTorrent, I wouldn't say it has a 'bad reputation' at all.
BitTorrent has successfully been used to provide everything from ISOs for distros to large commercial game demos.
The use of BT for transmitting illegal warez etc has been minimal mainly because BT requires a larger number of people to be interested in the particular warez than most P2P software for a download to work.
Its worth remembering that the primary use of BT is to get large files out to large numbers of people as soon after a given date as possible (while using the minimum of initial bandwidth).
What the article is actually getting at tho is that the PVR can be used to easily start a BT download on another (perhaps headless) machine to which the TV/PVR is networked.
Its convenient and useful but hardly revolutionary in this case.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'm waiting for someone to develop a way to distribute the load of web pages via bittorrent. Wouldn't it be great if when a webserver hit a certain load, it was served by another server?
Think about it: no more Slashdotting - just set your site up on a tracker the first time, and it's automagically covered under high load.
Does the name Torrentocracy really work here? Sounds like a bad form of government to me. But cool idea, even though none of us can check it out because it's /.'ed.
Could somebody please post an ASCII art version of it?
I love C++
You really should have submitted the screenshot link using Freecache ..
Only now it's too late, ofcourse..
1) is not correct. When receiving a torrent you receive random packages of data from all over the file. Hence you can often watch movies when they are ~80% downloaded and you happen to have got the indexing block.
If you think about it, if torrents were purely sequential they would be very slow since if say 10 people started torrenting from 1 seed they would all be fighting over the same blocks and couldn't help each other.
# Hack the planet, it's important.
True, But in many of these cases, winning a suit can be every bit as damaging as losing, as it's the trial itself theat delays work and drains the developer will to code. So I'm worried about it going to trial not losing. I am pretty certain the MPAA wouldn't win. But that won't stop them from making Isaac's, and anyone else associated with mythtv, life miserable.
I, for one, welcome our new Torrent leaders.
Code is law...
Sometimes that's the weight that has to be carried.
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
"...MythTV will be indistinguishable from "Movie Pirates" in the MPAA's eyes..."
Ahem. They prefer to be called buccaneer americans.
I mean honestly, the insensitivity of some people.
-- I have fans? Wow.
I suppose this is a good time to mention that BlogMatrix Jäger (http://jaeger.blogmatrix.com) now has pretty good support for Torrents attached as RSS enclosures. I just finished coding this up last week for the Windows version and released a Mac (beta) version that supports it on the weekend.
Now if there only was more feeds supporting torrents....
In a previous post I talked about a similar problem when TiVo suggested a similar feature. I think this would apply here too. This doesn't change the DVR recording model, which is schedule something and watch it later. The only thing that this adds is that it makes the Internet a like a TV channel, from which you can set up something to record, and then watch it later. It's not *exactly* like a TV channel, but it still fits the DVR model.
The person/people who are creating this tech have got to pull off a trick. They've got to figure out how to make sure that the only content available is distributed with the permission of the copyright holder. If they can do that, then they have a much more credible case that this is not intended to be a tool which is intended for copyright violation.
I don't mean to suggest that copyright is a good thing. But it exists in today's world. It never ceases to amaze me when we (the slashdot crowd) get up in arms when someone violates the GPL (i.e. violates copyright) and then we turn around and violate copyright when it comes to music or movies or ... The point is that we can't ride whatever side of the fence is most convenient. Either copyright should be enforceable and we support others rights to enforce their copyrights or copyright should not be enforceable and we allow GPL violations without restriction. Which means that if we want a solid GPL, then we should also ensure that this tech does everything to respect other's copyrights.
$.02.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
i'd been slashdotted once before and didnt go down. hopefully i can this back up pronto...
As neat as it would be to live in a world where everyone has PVR's integrated into their TV's, and anyone interested connects to a .torrent for the file through a web interface on their TV/media pc/whatever, I can't see it likely in any near future.
1. The inconvenience. As another poster indicated, BT downloads RANDOM chunks, so you'd have to wait until the entire file is downloaded until you can watch it.
2. The bandwidth. If this BT concept became as ubiquitous as PVR's will be in the future, the home ISPs would collectively have a heart attack. Now, I don't own my own ISP, but from what I understand just about all of them could never put up with every, or a significant amount, of their subscribers utilizing their upload amounts. They sell you those great 3mbit/1mbit (or whatever) lines, but if you consistently use the 1mbit line for WHATEVER reason, many ISPs (comcast anyone?) will automatically flag and cap you once you cross a data transfer amount (an amount they refuse to disclose to you). Granted, torrents are a great idea for spreading popular files, but it is a system that requires (or at least thrives on) people kicking back whatever they can into the system.
Anyone else see that as a serious problem?
Step 1: Pick a program to record.
Step 2: Wait for the program to become available.
Step 3: Watch the program.
Those 3 steps both describe the way this system would presumably work and the way a PVR already works with traditional broadcast TV. The only difference is whether step 2 represents waiting for the next episode to be broadcast or if it represents waiting for the file to be transferred via bit torrent. So the system's fine as long as you don't try and equate it to a utopian video on demand service.
Also, as a minor technical nitpick, it's not that the chunks are sent in random order, but rather that they're requested in random order. I know with BitTornado, there's a half-hidden option that lets you prioritize the files within a torrent to get the client to try and complete certain files first. So if you've got a multi-gig torrent containing several videos in a series, you can start watching the first video much more quickly than if you let things occur in the default, random order.
They have a word for that, its called appeasement.
They tried it with Hitler before World War II. It didn't work.
So what's the difference between the way torrents work and eDonkey?
There's another reason besides copyright infringement that the powers that be aren't gonna like this much -- this looks a hell of a lot like an early backbone for truly independent television. This could allow distribution of student films, public-access tv, homemade movies and shows to a much wider audience than might be otherwise available. If some company starts marketing a plug-n-go set top box with this feature enabled and pointing to an RSS feed site that contains exclusively (or even primarily) legal video, there's might be a measurable number people changing channels away from bad reality TV.
I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
GREAT! They didn't notice anything, but now you've posted that, they realized it's a pirate thing. THANK YOU :((
BoD
with bittorrent functionality this close to your PVR content... and RSS action, one could see where if enough mythTV boxen where onlin with this (and seeded), a true "on demand" programming that would beat the pants of what certain cable companies are offering currently.
*this* is why OSS and open standards and community/hacking innovation is soooo cool.
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
in the meantime, you can see a screenshot at http://freshmeat.net/projects/torrentocracy
I posted to slashdot last week about my python script that does the same thing. Although no GUI is provided, it does what it needs to do, works on all OS's (XBox Media Center as well) Please check it out at http://ddll.sdf1.net/archives/002626.html
Here is my original long-winded essay which explicated the RSS+BT idea:
http://scottraymond.net/archive/4745
After addressing the initial whys and wherefores, I speculate on how the pairing might be potent enought to spark an indie media revolution. Here's the text:
-- RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo.
The other day, 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.
Check this out Nucleus.
Python application, all platforms, searches RSS feeds and downloads the torrent.
Consider broadcast TV's efforts to sue cable for pirating their content, and the attempts to outlaw VCRs that record (not sure what they were called when they could only play). Exactly the same arguments can be made here. Of course the distributed nature clouds them a little :)
IP lawyers like Lessig discuss this all the time, though they have yet to win a real case.
it is a matter of useing the system to bump itself. If the GPL's ideals are truly better than copyright than eventually it will spread and become the new system but for now it has to use the exisiting system. Only time will tell which is the best or most acceptable system.
I have always thought of the GPL as the base line between free and propritary. The GPL is the most restrictive license that should ever be accepted, with BSD or public domain being the least restrictive. basicly saying all software should be GPL or better.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Torrentocracy is committed to only linking to legal torrents.
Random would imply that each piece of the file is just as likely to be sent at any given moment as another, which is not the case in a correctly implemented BitTorrent client. If implemented correctly (according to Bram Cohen's original design) clients should attempt to replicate the most rare pieces of the file as quickly as possible, to prevent them from being dropped from the swarm as well as to increase the overall capability of each client to retrieve the piece, hence the data sent/recieved would not at all be random.
Only legal torrents? And where are these legal torrents going to come from? Are you going to somehow license them from the TV stations or are they all legal until proven illegal...
You don't have to wait 24 hours to get out of everyone's queues?
And the difference will be... what?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I've been unslashdotted (at least for now).
Anybody heard of this:
White Water allows people with limited or metered bandwidth to publish files for download by thousands of people without saturating their bandwidth. Downloaders participate by distributing chunks of the file amongst themselves but gain by downloading several parts of the file simultaneously. The download speed will generally be limited only by the downloaders own bandwidth, not that of the publisher.
White water can also be used in server or proxy mode, publishing and downloading files for entire networks whilst providing more permanent sharing of cached files.
It's touted as being more featurefull than Bit-Torrent. Anyone using WhiteWater?
Well, if the Betamax decision holds up, they only have to show substantial non-infringing use. We'll see how it goes.
http://ww.walrond.org/
Historically, the actions of the industry have shown that they make little distinction between actual pirates (e.g., that guy on the street corner selling DVD's made from a theater camcording) and legitimate paying users who choose to exercise their fair use rights to consume media in a manner not approved by the MPAA. Mr. Valenti's now infamous "Boston stranger" comment springs to mind. These are the people that movie industry reps are usually talking about when they say "pirate."
MythTV users are already "pirates." But as long as they stay relatively few in number, the industry will ignore them.
Are you daft? There is lots of public domain or freely shareable audio and video available, and that's even before we get to any potential grey areas.
I do not have a signature
I was just thinking about this - since the chunks of the file are in semi-random order, that's a form of encryption, right? One has to have the index to be able to correctly assemble the pieces. As such, are torrents covered by the DMCA?
Damn I'm tired of hearing this. The DMCA only applies when you encrypt something that you own.
Whatever about the "distributed Tivo" analogies, ReplayTV of course already has massive distributed show sharing, the most notable example being the 15,000-strong Poopli library.
Da Blog
They sell you those great 3mbit/1mbit (or whatever) lines, but if you consistently use the 1mbit line for WHATEVER reason, many ISPs (comcast anyone?) will automatically flag and cap you once you cross a data transfer amount (an amount they refuse to disclose to you).
Dude, don't you have any governmental consumer protection agency in the United States?
I really think they might want to hear about this! Or maybe the FTC would want to know.
Anyway, if you pay for a 3 Mbit / 1 Mbit, and there's no clause saying how much you actually can use it, the line is yours to use with 1 Mbit outgoing for 24/7 365 days a year, and there is not a damn thing Comcast or anyone else can say about it...
The point is that we can't ride whatever side of the fence is most convenient. Either copyright should be enforceable and we support others rights to enforce their copyrights or copyright should not be enforceable and we allow GPL violations without restriction.
False dilemma. The two types of infringement are not necessarily synonymous. Copyrights create a monopoly on a work. Copylefts create a non-monopoly on a work. To infringe copyright is to disregard an exclusive right in a work. To infringe copyleft is to (re)create an exclusive right in a work. Copyleft only depends on copyright insofar as Congress has not written provisions into Title 17 that would allow authors to register a copyleft on a work instead of a copyright.
In the absence of copyright (ignoring, for the moment, the possibility of substituting private contracts for copyright), copyleft would not be necessary in order to preserve most of the freedoms which prompted the creation of copyleft: the freedom to use, the freedom to share, the freedom to derive new works. The only issue for software would be availability of source code, but one has to wonder what incentive there would be to conceal source code in a system in which the resulting binaries were commodities that could be freely traded, reverse engineered, etc etc.
I do not have a signature
The main thing would be that the server you are connecting to is specific for the file you're downloading, so the extra overhead of searching the server and sorting through irrelevant items is avoided. This also makes bittorrent seem more legitimate.
There are also probably some differences with the hashes and selection of which piece to download next. I think eDonkey uses one hash for the entire file (I'm not sure if I'm correct about this), whereas bittorrent uses a hash for each segment. This would mean that bittorrent has better error checking capabilities and could discard corruption sooner. Also, I don't think eDonkey uses a rarest first algorithm (though some clients could implement it).
... the link to legaltorrents.com, the smallest torrent listing in the known universe.
What was the point of referencing this? Aside from the obvious reason of trying to pretend this whole project isn't hugely illegal and going to attract even more negative attention from the mainstream press?
I'd like to think everyone that reads Slashdot is aware that technology isn't inherently evil, and that BitTorrent isn't an evil technology because people use it to distribute movies, but linking to legaltorrents.com - a site which has absolutely zero relevance to the subject matter - is lame. Just like to one of the many sites that are regularly updated with pirated TV feeds and get it over and done with - the waiting is killing me!
Now if you added collaborative filtering (see Amphetarate) we would have something infinitely cool. A TV viewer/recorder/broadcast station that "tivo-recommends" shows you'd want to see. Whoa.
~llauren
On the other hand, you can start collecting money for MythTV and when the other side will check its options it will decide to go sue somebody else...
don't forget, the free PVR software is (and will be) used by a very large croud
I think you may have missed my point, which is this: that as long as there are enforceable rules governing what can and can't be copied, if I expect you to abide by my application of those rules then it's entirely reasonable that you would expect me to abide by your application of those rules.
Personally, I don't think that the distinction that you make between copyright and copyleft exists today. Copyleft is a license granted under copyright. So it's also copyright. But even if copyleft were a completely seperate thing from copyright, it wouldn't diminish the point that I was trying to make: we (the slashdot crowd) have a double standard as far as what we expect should and shouldn't be enforceable. We expect our rules to be abided by with perfect compliance, but then turn around and ignore other folks rules with impunity.
And w.r.t. the technology being discussed, I think it would limit the types of litigation the author might see, if he/she put some system in place to ensure that the only material was distributed that had the permission of the copyright holder. I don't think it's too much to expect given that he's released his code under the GPL. If he expects others to comply with his license, he should enable his software to enforce compliance of other people's copyright licenses.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Now that I've thought some more, I do see your point.
Part of the problem with the GPL is the insistence on code sharing (which is ostensibly what prompted RMS to invent the GPL in the first place-- he wasn't motivated so much by a desire to share programs, what he wanted was access to the code in order to change programs).
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the GPL, especially when considered alongside the LGPL and the GNU FDL, the code sharing clauses indicate more of an urge to control derivative developers than to preserve freedom-- the LGPL specifically allows for restricted derivatives in some cases and the FDL requires certain invariant sections that prevent full freedom in preparing derivative works. With the GPL the onus on derivative developers is above and beyond that which we would find in a system without copyright. In such a system there would be nothing to compel sharing source code, but there would also be less incentive to hoard it.
The violations of the GPL that we hear about are not cases where the derivative developer is trying to exert control over users to prevent them from using, modifying, or sharing code, but simply where the developer hasn't shared source code with the users. So perhaps it's time for a license that falls somewhere between the public domain and the GPL and simply require that all downstream developers forfeit their right to privatize the software-- no requirement to share code, but no right to restrict use, distribution, or creation of further derivatives.
I do not have a signature