Slashdot Mirror
Evolving Swarms with Swarmstreaming
Orasis writes "Applications like Bittorrent have broadly validated swarming technology in the real-world. Now, the inventor of swarming has released a new technology called swarmstreaming that allows smooth progressive playback of content, skipping ahead, and random access without downloading the entire file. It's an HTTP proxy, so browsers, podcasting, and RSS apps should be able to use it transparently. "
Swarmstreaming: Swarming Downloads Evolved .swarm files. This is probably our most exciting advancement since the original invention of swarming.
r mstreaming
I'm proud to finally unveil swarmstreaming our third generation of swarming algorithms that are designed for the fastest downloads of web content and multimedia without any special server software or silly
The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they're playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don't have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.
Under the covers it is almost unimaginably more complicated than this because it also provides Self-Healing Downloads, implements a full-blown, scalable, Web Proxy Cache, and actively works to ensure that the video playback never studders or buffers by constantly monitoring and adapting to changing network conditions. For a raw feature dump, check out the SwarmStream SDK Feature Matrix
Nowadays, because of its immense popularity, most people have only heard of swarming because of Bittorrent. I have no animosity towards Bittorrent because it has done more than any application to prove the value of swarming to the general public. But if people are impressed by Bittorrent, they're going to be absolutely blow away by swarmstreaming and how far we've taken swarming since its humble beginnings five years ago.
The best source of information right now on swarmstreaming is Onion Networks SwarmStream SDK, so check it out and let me know what you think.
He links to http://onionnetworks.com/technology/swarming/#swa
December 13, 2004
.swarm files. This is probably our most exciting advancement since the original invention of swarming.
Swarmstreaming: Swarming Downloads Evolved
I'm proud to finally unveil swarmstreaming our third generation of swarming algorithms that are designed for the fastest downloads of web content and multimedia without any special server software or silly
The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they're playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don't have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.
Under the covers it is almost unimaginably more complicated than this because it also provides Self-Healing Downloads, implements a full-blown, scalable, Web Proxy Cache, and actively works to ensure that the video playback never studders or buffers by constantly monitoring and adapting to changing network conditions. For a raw feature dump, check out the SwarmStream SDK Feature Matrix
Nowadays, because of its immense popularity, most people have only heard of swarming because of Bittorrent. I have no animosity towards Bittorrent because it has done more than any application to prove the value of swarming to the general public. But if people are impressed by Bittorrent, they're going to be absolutely blow away by swarmstreaming and how far we've taken swarming since its humble beginnings five years ago.
The best source of information right now on swarmstreaming is Onion Networks SwarmStream SDK, so check it out and let me know what you think.
SwarmStream Development Suite Features
* Object code for the entire suite of SwarmStream(TM) APIs, including WebRAID(TM), DirectCache(TM), Throttling, and THEX.
* Visualization tools to perform live inspections and demonstrations of what SwarmStream is doing during your application run time.
* One full license for WAN Transport(TM) Server (normally $2950), an HTTP server specifically designed provide advanced SwarmStream features such as self-healing downloads and automatic mirror discovery.
* One full day of developer training
* 20 hours of ongoing support
* One year of free upgrades for all of the above software.
* Unlimited right to use and implement SwarmStream technology for testing, prototyping, demonstrations, or creation of reference designs or applications. Production deployment requires an additional Deployment License.
* One-time fee: $25,000
Anyone care that Orasis (the story author) = Justin Chapweske?
http://www.advogato.org/person/orasis/
-c
That is incorrect. Instant On has to do with streaming, not progressive downloading. The two are different.
Progressive downloading is where you download something like http://www.whatever.com/movie.mov in a web browser and it starts to play as soon as part of it is downloaded. You can then skip to wherever you want once you have downloaded that part (because at that point all you are doing is scrubbing through a movie file stored on your local machine.)
Streaming is where you load something like rtsp://stream.whatever.com/something.mov into a video player and it streams it to you. At no time during that process is anything stored on your local mahcine aside from what you are currently viewing and whatever the client has buffered ahead of that. Instant On instructs the server to skip the stream to another section.