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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."
PEP is less than 400 lines of PHP. Here's the source code for the curious:
http://prodigem.com/code/pep/pep.txt
(from the PEP home page)
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
have a torrent for this?
seeds please.
found in the del.icio.us popular video feed
I can't see any videos there, should be any? It's just a compilation of popular del.icio.us links, just like Oishii but built internally.
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Am I correct in believing we will soon have an even greater wealth of torrents readily available to the users of the World?
If so, three words for the *AA's: Yer Fucked. Cope.
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Automatically-downloaded RSS, distributed over the Net;
...Is it just me, or with the addition of a few local scripts, does this sound like a virus-writer's favorite fantasy? They need to make sure there are some very good safeguards on this!
Automatically-initiated Bittorrent downloads;
Then again, with Genetic Algorithms, perhaps this is the next missing ingredient for cybersentient life...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Much like breathing outside, having scripted automatic downloads of 'anything' in a feed isnt a great idea IMNSHO. Sounds like walking out the front door and having the exhaust from a diesel blown in my fact just because I said I liked trucks.....
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Okay, to clarify a few things:
Enclosures are basically the RSS way of providing a link to an external resource instead of having a normal entry. Think podcasting - basically an RSS file with links to MP3s instead of textual entries.
What this tool seems to be intended to do is take an RSS feed, download all the external resources from it, then generate and seed torrents for each external resource.
For those of you thinking that this is a way of distributing RSS feeds via BitTorrent, think again - the feeds are distributed normally, and this doesn't let existing feed readers do anything new with BitTorrent, they'll still be downloading both the feeds and the external resources though HTTP.
So basically, this would take a podcast, download the MP3s, and generate/seed torrents for each of the MP3s. The torrents would then appear on this PHP page for people to download, but feed readers wouldn't know anything about it and carry on operating exactly the same as normal.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
This, IMHO, totally rocks. Seriously: the computer now handles its own slashdot effect, intelligently. Truly, this allows for media-centric societies (like EPIC 2014) to be propogated; when we don't get that "Too many connections, MySQL fails miserably" message with popular content (even on normally-unpopular webpages), we are able to much more quickly diseminate information of interest to all of us.
Kudos to the developers; I, for one, am impressed.
Just to clarify, Prodigem comes with a torrent feed for each user. So once all your enclosures have been converted to .torrents, you can provide people with your new feed. For example, http://www.prodigem.com/torrents/rss/pep_delicious .xml
Someones job has been replaced by a small PHP script.
:-)
Shell script to follow
Sam
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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.)
Could a site have an enclosure that referred to a torrent feed? Would any readers support that?
I think that's what will really make torrents take off, when in the browser and elsewhere torrents are supported internally so you click on a link and the video (or whatever) just starts downloading, sharing the torrent while the download is in-progress. I thought Firefox was working on that in fact...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It would completely eliminate the slashdot effect, would likely have the general positive effect of improving people's download speeds, and would have the upshot of making it impossible for any leglislating body to make software like bittorrent illegal without making the internet itself illegal.
For those of you thinking that this is a way of distributing RSS feeds via BitTorrent, think again - the feeds are distributed normally, and this doesn't let existing feed readers do anything new with BitTorrent, they'll still be downloading both the feeds and the external resources though HTTP.
:- D
But when your RSS Feed can reference its own ".torrent", couldn't your news aggre-reader automatically hand that off to a BitTorrent engine underneath?
The perfect world: LiveCDs with Lots of RAM and no permanent storage. Boot; connects; listens; shares. And as soon as you unplug it, it's memory is wiped. (It would take considerable forensics to retrieve, that's for sure...)
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.
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You probably could distribute RSS via torrent, but i dont think you would gain much. You still need to fetch the .torrent from the rss webserver, so it is still getting lots of connections. Sure, the .torrent will be smaller than an xml file, but using the apache gzip should make them closer and wouldnt need a tracker or torrent client seeding.
Paul
Now we just need a sensable self-organization scheme so we can accurately locate things.
Using Enclosures isn't the way to do it -- rather, you should be including that content in-line.
But "linking" to a shared resource is a lot more like what the "Enclosure" tag was meant to be. In effect, if you replace the "http:" with "torrent:" your Enclosures would be that much more efficient.
What you're *NOT* doing is sending creating ".torrent" files of RSS content. What would be the point? All that XML is short-lived; it's designed to exist only until a new version appears, which could be any minute. You wouldn't want to have to build up SEEDS of FEEDS for a quickly-changing blog or news site. Only for persistent online storage.
Look, there are at least 12 other BT + RSS clients. A dozen. The idea has been done. About a year ago I put together a list which was canonical at the time, but at this point, I know of at least three others that I hadn't gotten around to adding to the list.
So, although I've got nothing against this one, it's not as if having one more client changes anything. The article makes it sound revolutionary. If nothing else, both Torrentocracy and Videora have been posted on Slashdot previously.
Keith
I'm sorry. I misread the article. This isn't about the client end, its about the server end, and good, easy-to-use solutions for that are basically non-existent, so this is a step in the right direction.
Keith
right now the problem they have is the load on the torrent tracker...
the one they show for demo is already on "too many connections" mode...
So, a bittorrent to access the tracker to get a torrent ?
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Yawn.
I wish there was a way to mark a slashdot posting with "uninsightful." Why is it that almost every single bittorrent-related posting to Slashdot is completely lacking in any sort of real advancement?
As an analog of prodigem's automatic torrent creation, http://isohunt.com/ provides search feeds over RSS of most BitTorrent resources over the internet. So you can search for a TV show for example and be updated on the newest eps in the RSS feed.
Cheers
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This does the whole live-stream multicast over P2P thing. Suprisingly, it sometimes works.
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