Evolving Swarms with Swarmstreaming 246
Orasis writes "Applications like Bittorrent have broadly validated swarming technology in the real-world. Now, the inventor of swarming has released a new technology called swarmstreaming that allows smooth progressive playback of content, skipping ahead, and random access without downloading the entire file. It's an HTTP proxy, so browsers, podcasting, and RSS apps should be able to use it transparently. "
How is this new? (Score:2, Informative)
Quicktime has had all that for several years. Apple called it "Instant On". I think both Real and Microsoft already use something similar.
Deeper Link (Score:2, Informative)
Server slowing down.. article text: (Score:4, Informative)
I'm proud to finally unveil swarmstreaming our third generation of swarming algorithms that are designed for the fastest downloads of web content and multimedia without any special server software or silly
The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they're playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don't have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.
Under the covers it is almost unimaginably more complicated than this because it also provides Self-Healing Downloads, implements a full-blown, scalable, Web Proxy Cache, and actively works to ensure that the video playback never studders or buffers by constantly monitoring and adapting to changing network conditions. For a raw feature dump, check out the SwarmStream SDK Feature Matrix
Nowadays, because of its immense popularity, most people have only heard of swarming because of Bittorrent. I have no animosity towards Bittorrent because it has done more than any application to prove the value of swarming to the general public. But if people are impressed by Bittorrent, they're going to be absolutely blow away by swarmstreaming and how far we've taken swarming since its humble beginnings five years ago.
The best source of information right now on swarmstreaming is Onion Networks SwarmStream SDK, so check it out and let me know what you think.
He links to http://onionnetworks.com/technology/swarming/#swa
The text (formatted better) (Score:4, Informative)
Swarmstreaming: Swarming Downloads Evolved
I'm proud to finally unveil swarmstreaming our third generation of swarming algorithms that are designed for the fastest downloads of web content and multimedia without any special server software or silly
The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they're playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don't have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.
Under the covers it is almost unimaginably more complicated than this because it also provides Self-Healing Downloads, implements a full-blown, scalable, Web Proxy Cache, and actively works to ensure that the video playback never studders or buffers by constantly monitoring and adapting to changing network conditions. For a raw feature dump, check out the SwarmStream SDK Feature Matrix
Nowadays, because of its immense popularity, most people have only heard of swarming because of Bittorrent. I have no animosity towards Bittorrent because it has done more than any application to prove the value of swarming to the general public. But if people are impressed by Bittorrent, they're going to be absolutely blow away by swarmstreaming and how far we've taken swarming since its humble beginnings five years ago.
The best source of information right now on swarmstreaming is Onion Networks SwarmStream SDK, so check it out and let me know what you think.
Re:How is this new? (Score:2, Informative)
Lets not forget the price of entry. (Score:5, Informative)
* Object code for the entire suite of SwarmStream(TM) APIs, including WebRAID(TM), DirectCache(TM), Throttling, and THEX.
* Visualization tools to perform live inspections and demonstrations of what SwarmStream is doing during your application run time.
* One full license for WAN Transport(TM) Server (normally $2950), an HTTP server specifically designed provide advanced SwarmStream features such as self-healing downloads and automatic mirror discovery.
* One full day of developer training
* 20 hours of ongoing support
* One year of free upgrades for all of the above software.
* Unlimited right to use and implement SwarmStream technology for testing, prototyping, demonstrations, or creation of reference designs or applications. Production deployment requires an additional Deployment License.
* One-time fee: $25,000
Orasis? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.advogato.org/person/orasis/ [advogato.org]
-c
Re:How is this new? (Score:5, Informative)
Progressive downloading is where you download something like http://www.whatever.com/movie.mov in a web browser and it starts to play as soon as part of it is downloaded. You can then skip to wherever you want once you have downloaded that part (because at that point all you are doing is scrubbing through a movie file stored on your local machine.)
Streaming is where you load something like rtsp://stream.whatever.com/something.mov into a video player and it streams it to you. At no time during that process is anything stored on your local mahcine aside from what you are currently viewing and whatever the client has buffered ahead of that. Instant On instructs the server to skip the stream to another section.
more linkage (Score:2, Informative)
On a sidenote, I seriously doubt that he is the very first one to have thought of swarming. Swarming has been around since before 1999 (when he claims he invented it). He *may* be the first one to have applied it to p2p/networking however.
related presentation on javalobby (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.javalobby.com/eps/swarmstream/
Swarmcast is Free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Swarming + streaming (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lets not forget the price of entry. (Score:2, Informative)
These guys must be pretty pissed that someone got slashdotted weeks before they did with some software that is entirely free, and does at least as much as what they claim their non-free software does.
But BT doesn't even allow you to watch first (Score:3, Informative)
Also, BT's speed is often bottlenecked by ISPs which cap uploads, therefore penalizing you on the downloading side.
It's right there on the website though - due to the nature of the technology you have to update your playback/reader/displayer app to take advantage of this. BT just works as is. If the BT developers really wanted to they could update the protocol to allow all this, or even more interesting features - like parchive file repair and recovery [slashdot.org], which would effectively eliminate the problem of swarms with lost seeds.
Re:Orasis? (Score:5, Informative)
Shameless self-promotion of closed-source software, $25k USD for a dev-kit, and Taco fell for it. uugh.
Re:In other news... (Score:1, Informative)
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/ACO/ACO.html [ulb.ac.be]
Re:How does this work? (Score:3, Informative)
You'd still probably want your nice expensive HDTV for stuff where quality really matters, but as far as delivering high-quality video over the Internet the capacity is definitely there. Well, it's there on the user side: if a million people suddenly started downloading 2.6GB files all at once I can imagine a few of the server's routers running shrieking from the data center while on fire.
Re:How does this work? (Score:3, Informative)