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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."

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

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

  3. 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.

  4. 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...