Bridging Torrent and RSS

lerhaupt writes "PEP, the Prodigem Enclosure Puller, is a small php script which find all the enclosures in an RSS 2.0 feed URL, and utilizing Prodigem's new bittorrent API will have a torrent created and seeded for each. As an example of just what this exactly means, Prodigem is now using PEP to automatically torrent the top items found in the del.icio.us popular video feed. In general this now means distribution via bittorrent can be had with almost zero work or duplication of effort."

Comments

Oh, How The Litigators Are Gonna Love THIS

[ausoleil]

Automation of Bittorrent was inevitable. More or less, torrents become the functional equivilant of the automated podcast gathering programs.

Things is, most podcasts are original content. Much of the 'torrents, and let's be honest, are not, and they are not exactly sanctioned (meaning they're pirated works.)

Gee, do you think that the MPAA legal goons will be among the early adopters? Think that they will have the RIAA folks for company?

Bet the farm on it.

Come to think of it, one must wonder when or if the adult industry will resort to infringement lawsuits to protect their unique content...sure there has been a scant amount of it, but eventually, someone is going to pay big for those Jenna Jameson clips. (LOL.)

SwarmStream?

[Doc Ruby]

Does anyone know how to make a swarm network like Torrent deliver chunks in a more sequential order? Even if locally they're unpredicted, maybe a "superchunk" order, where, say, each megabyte arrives in order, but the kilobytes within it fill in in an arbitrary order. That's what's necessary for Torrents to stream media like video on demand. If there are enough servers in the swarm (say millions), enough will likely be online at any time (say thousands) with the chunks that enough sources can respond (say hundreds) to ensure that every superchunk can be delivered "on cue" (pun intended), delivering a stream with minimum accumulation latency that can be compensated by a few-megabyte (milliseconds) buffer.

Re:SwarmStream?

[SlayerofGods]

You can do this in bittorent, you'd just need to tell your client to grab the pieces in order (I don't know if there are any that do this... but it would be possible to program it to do so)
Problem is however it will seriously degrade the ability of the network to provide the last pieces if everyone does this since that's when it's most likely someone will D/C.
Using random pieces ensures that the network will have a good amount of all the pieces and not a lopsided amount of the pieces towards the start.

Steaming over a swarm is problematic anyway because of varying connections speeds. You'd need to buffer so much ahead in case you hit someone with a slow DL speed or someone D/Cs in the middle of you downloading that chunk that it would basicly be just like downloading it anyway ;)

Re:SwarmStream?

[Doc Ruby]

Does the BT protocol already have a "mode" or config that already tells server peers to deliver packets in order? Or is the reprogramming you're talking about something that would work only with all reprogrammed torrent agents at opposite ends of the connections?

FWIW, the "superchunk" protocol architecture I described is designed to address exactly that latency problem, which is the entire shortcoming of existing torrent apps.