Researchers Test BitTorrent Live Streaming 129
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."
Open source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this open source?
There's already a closed source p2p video system that was used, among other things, for the streaming of the Blizzard WWI event (Diablo III announcement). It's called Octoshape. How does this compare?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octoshape [wikipedia.org]
http://www.octoshape.com/ [octoshape.com]
$22 billion for what? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want broadcast, broadcast. Sending countless duplicates of the same data in unicasts is WASTEFUL!
Re:I see some issues here... (Score:2, Insightful)
The entire POINT is to handle slashdot effect (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire POINT of torrent-style protocols is to, not just handle, but take advantage of, the Slashdot effect.
The more participants in the torrent, the more robust it is. It is potentially faster for the new participants as well (though this depends on the dynamics of growth and the number of simultaneous downloads per playing node).
)The average latency will increase as the torrent grows. No way to avoid that.)
Re:I see some issues here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't they just use multicast? This is what it was designed for.
Well that depends on the ISPs, doesn't it? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want broadcast, broadcast.
When the ISPs all support multicast in a compatible way (or even support it at all) we can switch over to that. Unfortunately many have not chosen to do that - at least so far. (Not surprising, since many of them are broadcast media conglomerates. Multicast-for-the-masses would enable their competition on a shoestring-budget level.) Meanwhile, live torrents do the same job for the users without additional support from the ISPs.
Yes it's not "efficient". But the main cost of the inefficiency falls squarely on the pocketbooks and infrastructure of the ISPs - the very people who have chosen not to provide the more efficient form of transport. How poetic.
Perhaps, as this begins to deploy and places an additional load on the ISPs' infrastructures, they will change their minds about promoting multicast and rush to deploy/enable it.
If they hurry they might head this off. If they wait until it's widely adopted they'll probably be stuck with it. Why should the users switch to something that's more efficient for the ISPs - but incompatible with what they're using now - when what they're using now does the job for themselves just fine?
So if the reduction in latency and upstream traffic from going with multicsast isn't enough to convince the users to switch, the ISPs will be stuck begging the authors to upgrade the code to use multicast distribution where available as a friendly gesture. B-)
Interesting parallels (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...
Re:Interesting parallels (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I see some issues here... (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, RTFA ... Uggh. p2p'ing 1 minute buffers. What a hack. But the problem with multicast is that it requires isp support (which I know *we* don't have setup, and I doubt many do or are willing to do --- it's hard enough to get people to think about ipv6 and it has a lot more compelling justification), or non-trivial tunnel setup, where as this just works as is. On that basis, I have to admit grudging admiration for cleverness, but ugggh! It's still s..t..r.e.....a.m...i.n.g...
Re:Open source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It works. (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot even begin to imagine the ramifications of this if it is adopted by the "pirate" scene.
That's because there really aren't any.
Ramifications, that is. Seriously, piracy is all about redistributing existed content. What would we have a live stream of, PirateBryan's ass?
Live streaming television of any channel in the world, or at least, anyone who wants to hook up a capture card, for starters.
Any show that people care about is online within an hour of airing. Maybe two.
And this wouldn't be as reliable as a straight download, either -- a straight download can die for a few minutes, and you lose nothing. You can download something in three hours that has a running time of two hours, for better quality. But this has to be realtime, and it's going to be hurt by the asynchronous/throttled nature of most connections.
I think we're watching the Internet change, fundamentally and dramatically, before our very eyes.
I think that's a vacuous statement -- the kind of thing a PHB or a politician would say to make himself sound in touch.
The Internet is always changing. It's always dramatic, and often fundamental -- or never fundamental, depending on how you look at it (we still use TCP, IP, UDP, ICMP...) That's the nature of the beast.
Moore's Law, and similar properties -- simple raw numbers changing, in terms of bandwidth, storage, processing power, and mobile power/size/weight/features/battery life -- all of these proceed, for months or years at a time, simply making our lives easier.
Then, suddenly, someone realizes that this extra capacity has made something new possible. Suddenly, the Internet is ubiquitous enough that Google Docs is acceptable. Suddenly, bandwidth is fast enough that YouTube is possible. Suddenly, Google has enough sheer CPU hours to do a search engine via voice recognition.
There are other ways in which change happens, but it is the nature of the beast for technology to change.
In other words, what you just said is roughly equivalent to this. [xkcd.com] I'm not so much disagreeing with you as saying "Duh!"
So no, I don't think that "streaming BitTorrent" will be that earth-shattering. It will be cool -- it might even become as cool as YouTube. But if you have some perspective, YouTube is hardly the biggest thing that ever happened to the Internet.