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Wikimedia Trying P2P Video Distribution

Posted by Soulskill on from the spin-this-one,-mpaa dept.

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."

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    a) Wikimedia is (allegedly) encyclopaedic media, whilst youtube is cats. Not direct competition.
    b) My outbound connection is extremely limited.
    c) The people who need to be convinced fight against "websites" and "torrents", but they would have a real "Oh my God - it's full of data!" moment if they understood what they were talking about. It's all just bits. Encrypted bits even more so.

  2. With Chrome... by kodr · · Score: 3, Informative

    "It is unfortunately not available for your browser"

  3. Re:Great by sakdoctor · · Score: 2, Informative

    people see Colour in data

    I don't even see the colours anymore. All I see SYN, SYN, ACK, ACK, FIN, ACK

  4. Re:Network neutrality by icebraining · · Score: 2, Informative

    I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue.

    --Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt

    --
    Dilbert RSS feed
  5. Re:Not Great Enough by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 2, Informative

    IPv6 includes multicast IIRC.
    IPv4 multicast is basically broken by NAT, so is unlikely to ever get used on the internet itself.

  6. Re:Not Great Enough by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    the routers will have to store huge in-memory databases to keep track of the downstream routers who need each packet stream

    Congratulations. You've just explained why multicast was never deployed over the public IPv4 Internet even before NAT had become widespread.