Blog Torrent Beta Released

chatooya writes "Downhill Battle has released the first public preview of Blog Torrent a "simplified" BitTorrent package that they developed because, "Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings." Features include: integrated torrent creation and upload, simple non-MySQL installation, and an RSS feed for every tracker. Currently Windows only on the client side, but Mac and Linux versions are in the works."

Comments

New P2P app

[glrotate]

Suprnova.org is doing a beta of their own p2p app. keep an eye out.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, theoretically the overhead of bittorrent is not much higher than that of simply running an FTP server (assuming the tracker server is also seeding the file, which would be necessary in this situation). So, if only one person is downloading the file, then it would be better to just run an FTP server. but, as soon as a second person joins the torrent, the first person starts uploading to them, offloading some of the bandwidth burden from the tracker server.

pretty simple

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[HyperChicken]

I think two people on at the same time isn't likely for home movies type of things. And I doubt that the average Windows user would bother leaving BitTorrent running after the file is downloaded.

This idea is flawed.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[jerometremblay]

What if it IS likely that two people will be there at the same time? If I post yesterday's party videos, I potentially have as many downloads as there were people.

Unless of course you always film yourself alone.

The idea is not flawed.

Re:User mindset

[holmes wilson]

Hey, Holmes from Downhill Battle here.

We definitely thought about that, and other people have raised that concern. But here's how we view it:

First, the only person who gets an executable to download is a first time user. Once Blogtorrent is installed, the tracker detects that and just serves you up regular torrent files (or blogtorrent files for uploaders). So we aren't creating any habits here.

And considering the first time user, they fall into one of two camps. Either they're an experienced user who understands what's bad about running an executable from an untrusted website, or they're not.

If the former, they'll be happy to install Blogtorrent if the tracker is running on a site they trust, while if it's on "war3z d00d's p2p moviez page" they probably won't. And they won't have to. It will be enough to check out Blogtorrent.com and download it there.

And if the latter is true (our user doesn't know what's bad about running executables from shady sites) then their computer is probably already a petri dish of virii trojans, adware, and virii, or it will get that way soon. And the majority of such users would have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around how Bittorrent works that they'd just give up without the executable installer.

Deciding to *not* give these users an executable installer just means deciding (on their behalf) that they should continue their life in adware purgatory, but without that video clip or album they wanted. We wouldn't really be protecting anybody by not providing this feature.

And I know Bittorrent is pretty easy to install, but trust us, we've talked to so many people who have tried *so* hard to get it and failed miserably. With the executable, anybody who wants a file will end up getting it. And next time they're covered.

Re:LOL

[holmes wilson]

And as far as the MySQL support goes, that's definitely coming. We want to integrate Blogtorrent with the Drupal/Civicspace CMS real soon, and part of that will be rewriting it to use a database instead of flat files.

Holmes
Downhill Battle

Re:Screws up already installed clients

[katsushiro]

Okay, I know you're trolling, but I'll bite, simply because it really sucks when people make completely false statements about something they know nothing about and then no one calls them on it:

If you'd bothered to actually take a look at the 'BlogTorrent' thing (I hate the name, by the way, but what can you do?), you'd see that it *DOES* include separately hosting the .torrent for those of us with a favorite Torrent client. In fact, since I actually have it installed on my server and have been trying it out, I can copy and paste the text on the page:

How do I download a file?

If you've never used BitTorrent before, just click on the "Easy Downloader" link next to the file you want. Open the Easy Downloader (by clicking "open" in your browser, or by saving it to your Desktop and double clicking on it). That will install the Blog Torrent plugin and begin downloading the file you want. Note: if you already have a BitTorrent client installed, you do not need the Easy Downloader, just click on the .torrent file. (Emphasis added)

Running EXE files

[Clark_Kent]

As Holmes pointed out, we've already thought about this issue, and I think we've come up with the most reasonable solution possible. This post explains it nicely:

To clear things up once and for all: End users only need to download an installer for Blog Torrent ONCE, just as they would for any other Bit Torrent client. After that, they just download torrents. When it comes down to it, any software that's going to be doing downloading will need permission to access the local machine. The best way we can deal with this is make the user deal with the permissions issue as few times as possible in a way that they are familiar with. Giving people an EXE installer once seems to be the best way to achieve this on Windows.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[timeOday]

Worse yet, due to the assyemtry, if you let BitTorrent use that full 384Kbps upstream, all other Internet use will be abysmally slow. So you're best off capping it at half that, or so.

You can get around that, at least on Linux, using LARTC. I have set up my box so "miscellaneous" packets (p2p, email, etc) are only sent if there are NO ssh or web browsing packets ready to go (script). There may be a few remnants of wondershaper in there, but I think mine is better :)

It does work. With this in place the effect of running BitTorrent (or whatever) in the background is tiny.