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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. "

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  1. Re:How does this work? by ravenspear · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Skipping ahead" Will skip to a part of the clip that you may not have. This=lag

    The technology to eliminate lag already exists and has been implemented. I have used it myself.

    What's more, usually you cannot download one second of movie in one second of time, unless you have a crazy tricked out connection.

    What nonsense. Have you ever downloaded a trailer from here? If the trailer starts to play immediately when you start downloading (i.e. the gray progress bar proceeds faster than the location marker), then you are downloading 1 second of movie in a time faster than 1 second. I can assure you that millions of people have a connection fast enough to do this.

    This means that if you skip to a part you haven't seen yet, you will have to wait even longer for buffering.

    Again, not necessarily. Buffering is when the streaming software requires that you download x amount of content ahead of the time you actually view it to account for inconsistencies in the stream or packet loss. If those can be eliminated, and connections made fast enough, there is no empirical reason why buffering must continue to be utilized.