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Researchers Test BitTorrent Live Streaming

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the pirating-without-the-pesky-evidence-trail dept.

An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak reports that the Swarmplayer, developed by the P2P-Next research group, is now capable of streaming live video in true 4th generation P2P style using a zero-server approach. With a $22 million project budget from the EU and partners, the P2P-Next research group intends to redefine how video is viewed on the Internet. The researchers have launched a streaming experiment where you can tune in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a 5 minute weather report (not live) from the BBC. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are also available."

10 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. I see some issues here... by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not sure how smooth this would be, since BT usually sends packets in the order of availability, not how it streams... And I am not sure if it is a strange algorithm in my client or I am cursed, but the first file in a torrent is always the last to finish for me.

    1. Re:I see some issues here... by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You can set priorities on the files, and your client will request those pieces first. In a streaming situation, I would imagine that everyone's client would be set to prioritize the chunks in order. Which I think would actually probably work really well. Everyone's client would become really bottom heavy as they watched the movie, and download speeds would start out really fast, and gradually taper off. If you had enough clients, I would imagine that it wouldn't be an issue.

      Very interesting concept, and I'm surprised nobody thought of it sooner. It could start a new p2p video service like the world has never seen. Instead of taking 2 hours to download the movie, then watching it, you can watch any movie on pirate bay, right now. The trick is just that everyone needs to be using a streaming client.

    2. Re:I see some issues here... by DeadDecoy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hmmm...I wonder how long it will be then, until we see isp's whining about how we're clogging up their inter-tubes. If the wait time to view a streaming video is reduced, I imagine that it will increase the preference or desire to see such a video online versus not watching it or seeing it through some other medium.

    3. Re:I see some issues here... by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I just installed the player and watched the videos. I'm running Linux, so it might work different in Windows (probably not a whole lot different though). When you open up the torrent with their player, it essentially functions like a normal bittorrent client, with a lot of automation. It will buffer for a bit, and then open up VLC (or whatever your default player is?) and start playing the stream. You don't actually see a list of all the torrents you are currently distributing, but it saves them to a cache somewhere, and seeds them even after you are done watching them. It just sits in the system tray and does its thing. Which is probably a necessity for this to work.

    4. Re:I see some issues here... by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      multicast requires that everyone be watching it at the same time.

      If it's a live stream, isn't that a given?

      Otherwise, it could follow the same model as pay per view -- start a new multicast session every hour or so.

      And assume it isn't a stream -- Multicast is still an advantage. Imagine they simply replay it over and over, at a reasonable download speed -- then bandwidth costs are close to zero, for everyone involved.

      What I don't understand is why everyone keeps trying to s..t...r.e...a....m stuff over the internet.

      Two reasons.

      First, if it's actually live, it kind of has to be a stream. Otherwise, well, it wouldn't be live. Kind of the point, and that one's a "duh".

      I don't care for most things, but it's not difficult to imagine wanting audience participation, or simply putting up a live stream of whatever's going on in a particular area right now -- thus, whenever you tune it, it's there, but no point even caching it on the server.

      Second, it helps protect against piracy. Well, not really, but it means you have to reverse engineer the app doing the streaming and/or the protocol, not just a file sitting somewhere in the cache.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  2. Re:Open source? by geogob · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been using octoshape for quite while now. Although the concept is interesting and the image quality is fairly good compared to analogue-SDTV, the system doesn't behave flawlessly.

    Quite often, the systems simply doesn't work. At some point, the client kept its connection up on the P2P network. Of course, this happened while I was out of town (I'm not the single user of the system) and didn't catch the issue until I came back home. In 3 days, it ate over 60% of my HS cable internet cap (100 GB up+down).

  3. Already existing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They call it Zattoo
    it's using encryptet contents over bittorrent.

  4. Maby a good idea for the future, forget it today by xiando · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My ADSL connection is 2.5Mbit out, 23Mbit in. It was 0.5Mbit/8Mbit until the local telco reciently upgraded some central. I can not send as much out as I take in, nor can most other Internet users. Thus; live video streaming will simply not work as long as the large majority simply can't send as much video out as they require in in order to view the video.

    It really does not matter that it takes longer to download than it takes to view the video when viewing television series from tv-channels like eztv, which is why BitTorrent is so popular.

    This BitTorrent streaming idea is great in theory and it will work great if we upgrade all end-user connections, backbones and so on. The future will be great! But I do not think the tubes are ready just yet.

    --
    9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
  5. It works. by lkypnk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apparently, I am watching a live stream in moderate resolution at full frame rate from the roof of a building in the Netherlands.

    It works.

    I cannot even begin to imagine the ramifications of this if it is adopted by the "pirate" scene. I know its been done with closed source software before, but none of them work as fluently as this trial is. Live streaming television of any channel in the world, or at least, anyone who wants to hook up a capture card, for starters.

    I think we're watching the Internet change, fundamentally and dramatically, before our very eyes.

  6. Re:Interesting parallels by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is hilarious. The transport layer can theoretically handle this perfectly well, via UDP multicast.

    Correct. Except for the fact that it is not just theoretical problem they're fixing. You forget that

    1) they want a "serverless" medium for their lowered accountability in case of copyright violations (and the downloaders for "anonymity" due to the same thing)

    2) UDP doesn't ensure delivery. /.ers testing this say there's little drops on this. UDP doesn't give you that. Realplayer UDP-casting for videos died a long time ago. Video streaming is mostly flash and WiMP. Mainstream people are suckers for dropped-frame-free videos linked to these concepts: "delivery" and "guarantee". Note that pauses for buffering don't count as dropped frames. Your next frame comes right after the pause... guaranteed ;)

    3) Most importantly: lack of "repeat" bandwidth costs. Owner seeds once, and people download several times the cost of that seed at the expense of the buyers/users. Without torrenting you transmit the whole movie every time a new downloader comes aboard your UDP swarm. Money talks