Video Streaming over BitTorrent networks

tribler.org

5 points·mariorz··5 comments

Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't make any sense to use Bittorrent to stream videos. One of the strengths of Bittorrent is that you don't download everything sequentially (which makes sense to do if you're streaming audio and/or video). It's broken up into pieces that can be sent randomly to many users who then redistribute the data.

Sure, there's Initial Seeding (spec: http://tinyurl.com/6y2ng2 ) which sends data sequentially. But that refuses to send data to a peer until that peer has already sent its data out to everyone else. There's also HTTP-based seeding (spec: http://tinyurl.com/p5kpn ) but the implementations - or attempted implementations - that I'm aware of don't exactly work well.

Yes they modified the bittorent protocol, article talks about it, it remains backward compatible though (for non-live streams).

On a different note, please cut it out with the tinyurls (not just you everyone), needless obfuscation of usable information makes no sense.

I read the article and noted that they modified the protocol. I also mentioned a bunch of previous ways that the protocol was changed that might be similar to what tribler is doing and that they don't exactly work very well. Hence my skepticism.

Also, if you're going to click the URL anyway, so what difference does it make if its tinyurl'd or not? I don't expect to be rickrolled on HN.

The url is information I use when deciding to click or not, especially if you're linking to non-html files. More importantly whats the point? Nobody is getting charged by the character here. It's a terribly annoying custom probably encouraged by that twitter app.

Some fun - I just posted The BitTorrent Song:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/musical-geek-friday-the-bittorr...

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