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Wikimedia Trying P2P Video Distribution
bigmammoth writes "One potential problem with campaigns and programs to increase video on Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images. The P2P-Next consortium has created an HTML5 streaming BitTorrent browser add-on to try and help experiment with ways to reduce the costs of video distribution. As described in a Wikimedia tech blog post, once the SwarmPlayer add-on is installed, and when using the multimedia beta, video on the site will be streamed via the hybrid HTTP / BitTorrent SwarmPlayer. For smooth playback the Swarmplayer downloads high priority pieces over HTTP while getting low priority bits from the BitTorrent swarm. The same technology is available for experimentation with any site via the standalone version of the Kaltura HTML5 Media library."
This is good news. It'll:
a) make it a lot easier to compete with the likes of youtube.
b) be very easy to take advantage of, once integrated into CMS's.
c) make it a lot harder to argue that P2P is only something that pirates use, rather than simply modern technology.
Why not just use Youtube to host the videos, after archiving them in a Wikimedia store?
Or is this more about control than openness? What value does hosting them at Wikimedia have over Youtube?
Youtube isn't that restrictive as long as you aren't infringing copyright..
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
It will make it much harder to use Wikipedia as a reference. You will want to look up something quickly and be presented with four our five possibly relevant 10-minute videocasts on the subject.
"It is unfortunately not available for your browser"
P2P is good for content which everybody wants right now but what about the situation where you have an encyclopedia full of videos and few of them are accessed by different browsers in any given day? Client side caches can't hold on to this stuff for ever. I wonder if there is any benefit from using P2P in this case.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Isn't this a form of net neutrality, where we have high and low priority data ?
PLEASE SEED!!
This sounds nice. With the back up of HTTP server, this means the leechers will be irrelevant, when nobody else is seeding. Many people will just leech, watch and forget, without giving back seed. Because of the lack of seeds, the file hosting sites are so damn popular now. If everyone was seeding after download, then nobody would need file hosting services. Even YouTube, Vimeo and other video sites may go to this model then. (HTTP with backup of bit torrent and vice versa) cool cool cool. This gets even better for the people like me who have different Internet speed for country traffic and abroad traffic (I have 10 times faster traffic from local servers), so when torrenting from someone nearby, I will have faster speed, than downloading from the abroad server. Nice.
It seems to me that the fundamental problem is still not being addressed. That problem is simply that the source-server feeds many destinations. While P2P can help, this doesn't change the fact that all the data still has to pass through various intermediate packet-transfer servers. I personally think THOSE servers should be recruited to help transmit video. So, in my opinion, the way it should work is something like this:
1. Source server is contacted by N clients through X intermediary servers, where X=A+B+C+...(some sequence of intermediaries).
2. Source server transmits to "A" group of intermediary servers, the "closest" ones in the network.
3. The "B" group of intermediary servers is larger than the "A" group, but these are still a much smaller group than the total number of clients. What the "A" group does is "packet duplication" specifically because of knowing its members are involved in transfer of video data. Thus do all the "B" group of intermediary servers receive enough packets, without any extra load on the source-server.
4. The "C" group of intermediary servers is larger than the "B" group; the "B" group does another level of packet-duplication, to keep all the "C" group servers fed. And the "C" group feeds the "D" group, and so on.
5. ANY server that also directly feeds clients simply does a bit more packet-duplication, in addition to keeping "downstream" intermediary servers fed with video data.
Now I'm aware that P2P tends to do something like the above, except that none of the normal Internet packet-transfer servers are involved in packet-duplication. They are, however, involved in transmitting greater numbers of packets than truly needs to be transmitted, and that is why I like this particular implementation for serving video streams.
It is unfortunately not available for your browser.
We don't all enjoy the speed, safety and rock solid reliability of IE6, you know...
Lets see how the MAFIAA/Government/ISPs deal with P2P being used like this...
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
a obvious use for Bittorrent would be serve big backups of wikipedia as bittorrent.
but the backups of Wikipedia are not served that way, because make no sense, since at the speed that change, you will have people seeding a old version no one wants anymore.
bittorrent has not appeal for files that can change often.
just saying...
-Woof woof woof!
Hi guyz, have you heard of multicast?
I'm definitely interested in this and will be checking it out once I get home from school. What other possibilities does this technology hint at?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
How would it help if 90% of web users are behind NAT/proxy?
Who does have real IP on the desktop at all? Do I have to open inbound port directly to my browser?
I'd like to keep all P2P traffic on my router, so it doesn't get anywhere inside my LAN
how long do you have a wikipedia video open? most videos are between 10 and 30 seconds. this is not enough to even find enough peers. and then you should seed at least twice the bytes you downloaded ... this will not work.
and you would need to view videos at times when other people are viewing these videos, too.
Wikipedia - whose "fair use" justification is frequently "we couldn't find an image usable under the normal interpretations of fair use, so we used this one anyhow"
As far as I can tell, all non-free media on English Wikipedia, other than WMF logos, is supposed to be an excerpt (factors 3 and 4) used in context of commentary on the image's subject (factor 1), and the subject has to be of a nature that free images cannot be produced (factor 2). Most of these are of A. a notable non-free work of authorship or B. a notable person who is dead or extraordinarily reclusive. Can you cite specific abuses of fair use on Wikipedia so that I can file an IFD?
It's a wiki. Someone can upload a transcript. If you're lucky, it might even be in a timed text format such as LRC or SRT that can also serve as subtitles.
c) make it a lot harder to argue that P2P is only something that pirates use, rather than simply modern technology.
But... but... I thought that only evil pedo-terrorist pirates are using Torrent, to siphon the hard gained profits out of the pocket of the poor record- / motion picture- industry !~
More seriously : I'm actually surprised that it took so much time until someone decided to implemented it. Leveraging P2P to offload server load for user-made and -uploaded videos (just like it's already used to offload bandwidth requirement for distributed TV - like torrentocracy - and for upgrades - like in WoW. ) just make perfectly sense.
In fact, it would be good if some kind of standard was added, perhaps to HTML5.1 allowing other browser to participate in the P2P offloading in a standardized manner.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Google Gears also started as a plugin before being swallowed by HTML5.
Video where handled by plugins before being considered by the VIDEO tag of HTML5.
3D Web also started as a plugin before WebGL emerged as a standard.
see any tendency ?
Well, if things keep that way, bittorrent P2P server offloading could be integrated into HTML5.1 /. effect, if links on the main page where modified to leverage such swarming, in addition to direct HTTP access to the /.ed server.
could even help mitigating the
If enough proponents push for it (and it is really useful, so it's worth pushing for) we might start to see more widespread adotpion : Firefox, but also Chrome, Opera, Safari.
perhaps even one day IE. Eventually. In a distant future. Once they finally finish getting previous standards right....
The only shortcoming : hope that the SHA cryptographic hashing/digest algorithm used by bittorrent doesn't get cracked, or malicious users will start flooding swarms with bogus packet, trying to inject their own shock site- or vulnerability- laden data instead of the legitimate data the P2P network was supposed to offload (just like some are injecting bogus packets into eDonkey networks, as MD4 is not secure anymore).
The other short coming : having an easy access to configuration to enable/disable/throttle uploads, to avoid the outbound connections exceeding the limits of data plan. Better if it's automatic (like leveraging NetworkManager on Linux).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
For those wondering where Swarmplayer 2.0 came from, I believe it is from Tribler's SwarmPlayer:
http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/SwarmPlayer
I wrote my master thesis on a similar solution. I made a Python-based standalone implementation of the protocol and a simulator for it with everything happening on a single local machine. No nodes or no internet traffic. Kind of lame, but hey I got my degree :) Never bothered to do a proper implementation suitable for the real world use, as I got bored to tears by the time the thesis was done. Glad to see this something like this happening for real.
There goes another one of my ideas. Of course #bittorrent isn't logged. I should really start a darned blog :-(
it would be cool if they could use metalink, an internet standard for describing files offered in hybrid ftp/http/p2p content distribution systems, already used by a lot of open source projects.