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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."

18 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Arrgh Matey by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Its using BT so it must be piracy, right?

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:Arrgh Matey by dreamchaser · · Score: 3, Funny

      Indeed. I am waiting for a P2P technology that is so stealthy, nobody knows it even exists. Then I can be a Ninja and not a Pirate.

  2. Open source? by jaxdahl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is this open source?
    There's already a closed source p2p video system that was used, among other things, for the streaming of the Blizzard WWI event (Diablo III announcement). It's called Octoshape. How does this compare?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octoshape
    http://www.octoshape.com/

    1. Re:Open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://svn.tribler.org/abc/tags/swarmplayer-1.0.0/

  3. 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 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.

    3. Re:I see some issues here... by camperdave · · Score: 3, Informative

      So, like all torrents, only the popular stuff will play well. I'm not going to get a stream of Tales of the Gold Monkey in anything like real time.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    4. Re:I see some issues here... by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why don't they just use multicast? This is what it was designed for.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    5. Re:I see some issues here... by Joe+U · · Score: 3, Funny

      Mod parent down. Proper use of Internet protocols (except HTML) is frowned upon here.

      Seriously, for some reason people don't like multicast, I really don't know why.

    6. Re:I see some issues here... by RayNbow · · Score: 4, Informative

      Standard BitTorrent works because of the Tit-For-Tat incentive mechanism. The whole idea is that a peer exchanges pieces with another peer, so it can achieve a higher download rate than just getting pieces from the seed.

      Now, I won't go into details, but the reason you get your files in some arbitrary order is because a BitTorrent swarm is just like a marketplace. Certain pieces are rare and might have long queues, i.e. many peers are interested in it and are competing for it. Other pieces are so common, most peers are not interested in it and can thus be exchanged with fewer peers. So the trick to achieving high download speeds is to obtain the right pieces that are still valuable for further trade, while not spending too much time on obtaining such a valuable piece.

      Now, with video-on-demand (and live streams), the whole Tit-For-Tat system no longer works. In this situation, peers must obtain pieces in order for playback. The problem now is that a peer that wants the next minute of the video can only get it from a peer whose playback position is further ahead. The latter peer however is not interested in pieces from the former (since it already has these) and thus no exchange will take place.

      So, the solution the Tribler team came up with is the Give-to-Get incentive mechanism. A peer will only receive pieces from others if it sends its pieces to those that are interested, i.e. peers that have seen even less of the video. This requires some feedback, so a peer that receives some pieces will have to inform others that it recently has received data from a certain sender. Thus, you could say that the Give-to-Get incentive mechanism is based on reputation.

    7. Re:I see some issues here... by SEWilco · · Score: 3, Informative
      There is no "video", there is but a stream.

      In the example, the streaming is actually taking place from 15 minute pieces. When enough of the current piece has been collected, the video starts playing on your machine. While you're watching the stream, the rest of the 15 minute piece is collected and shared. The next 15 minute piece is collected/shared when it appears. A while (I don't remember if it was 15 or 30 minutes) after you saw it, the older pieces are deleted from your machine.

      This is similar to how some Internet radio streams work. You're actually listening to a bunch of short streams encoded in some audio format. The major difference here is that a slightly modified BitTorrent protocol is being used.

  4. $22 billion for what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you want broadcast, broadcast. Sending countless duplicates of the same data in unicasts is WASTEFUL!

  5. UGH by pxc · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't understand why people keep making this association!

    Pirates HATE torrents. I can't even tell you how many beautiful vessels we've lost to the fuckers. Ugh.

    Sincerely,

    The Racketeering Industry Association of America

    PS: RAmen.

  6. 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
  7. 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.

  8. Interesting parallels by cheekymatt · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    But here we are, implementing a multicast-like streaming system higher in the stack to overcome the fact that most ISPs have disabled multicast at their routers. If something like this takes off, maybe this would actually encourage ISPs to enable multicast.

    Also, I find this whole development awfully similar to the fact that many firewalls block everything other than HTTP on port 80, so now many apps have just moved to talking HTTP on port 80, or inventing pseudo-protocols on top of HTTP.

    Ahhh, the Internet...

  9. Re:Already existing by freelunch · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    I watched the World Cup Futbol championship on Zattoo and it was sometimes more "real time" than broadcast TV. How do they do that? This bittorrent prototype buffers for a full minute. And I notice the live stream isn't even doing any sharing (according to the status page).