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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 is unfortunately not available for your browser"
Didn't you read that this is a hybrid system? If there are no seeders, everything will come over HTTP.
Jeez, people really aren't even bothering to read even the summaries now.
Network neutrality is about the ISPs treating data as equal, not about the clients or servers.
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PLEASE SEED!!
--Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt
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The worst-case performance probably isn't appreciably worse than it is now, and the best-case performance is much better, so the average is probably at least a little bit better. Furthermore, getting code like this into more people's browsers can increase the accessibility of the technology for other sites. So even if it's a dead-end for Wikimedia, it's a potential boon to video sites.
Really, if it doesn't bother Wikimedia, the only ones bothered by it should be ISPs and content creators who want to be takedown-happy.
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.
Are you thinking multicast? Because this is the real need here.
Can anyone fill us in on where is multicast on the internet right now? It seems pretty far away - even further away than IPv6.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
IPv6 includes multicast IIRC.
IPv4 multicast is basically broken by NAT, so is unlikely to ever get used on the internet itself.
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.