Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfunk911 | Hacker News Reader

I use and love put.io. Completely hassle free. I'd never go back.

The killer feature is instant completion of torrents if someone else has already downloaded them. I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.

View on HN

Then you might want to try XBMCtorrent [1]. (disclosure: I wrote it)

Select a torrent, watch it.

[1] http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQiC62ig3N0

Edit: wrong url

Useless for US citizens who are not using private VPN, since it downloads torrents on your machine, which tells legal institutions that your IP address is downloading that movie using torrent.

So far guys I'm using StreamNation.com (http://www.streamnation.com), way better than put.io, their UI is amazing, they offer way more features and their iOS app is a killer with an offline mode. Last the pricing: they are 10 times less expensive. Plus they transcode all videos and stream them, and they support magnets! You should try my friends, no-brainer!

It's interesting that they don't talk about torrent anywhere on the pages, in order to verify that they support it I had to search on their blog for word like "magnet". I guess they probably prefer to have a low profile approach and use generic sentences like "your ripped DVDs, video files and web clips"

> I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.

Is that at all legal? Unless you mean films that have fallen into the public domain or that remain unlicensed in your nation or jurisdiction, I'm pretty sure this is unlawful. If there aren't laws on the books yet concerning a 3rd party service downloading or hosting pirated content on one's behalf yet, I would still consider this to be unethical behavior.

Does put.io intend to share the business tactics of MegaUpload? (ie. looking the other way concerning how many users will make use of the service?)

I don't mean to sound belligerent. I feel this is an angle that would be good to discuss.

Considering it probably wouldn't be any more legal the slower way, I can't see how that question is salient.

Because instead of an annonymous user, there is now a company to sue. I don't see them lasting unless they create copyright controls that will make most people not want to use them.

They exists for over 4-5 years now (I don't remember exactly the first time I discovered this service, but it was around that time).

I believe the are located in an area where legislations are less strict and they can do this without having any problems.

That would explain it. Thank you.

I have to agree. the service clearly targets people who want to access consumer video torrents, and much of that content is pirated.

they avoid some problems by requiring everyone to pay directly. Megaupload really got into trouble for their affiliate programs, which essentially paid people to upload pirated content. Those programs drove a whole industry in Vietnam.

They clearly keep track of unique torrents across users because they provide the instant download feature. Thus they should be able to respond to DMCA requests quickly. By the same token, they may come under legal pressure to disclose user information about accounts that accessed successfully DMCA'd files.

There are legitimate uses for Bit torrent though, and this service seems like it would benefit the health of ecosystem as a whole. They'll probably seed a lot of data, maybe especially rare data. That would be helpful for things like big scientific datasets that often end up hosted on some .edu FTP site.

Are they seeding too? or just leaching?

Very good question. I have a feeling it's the latter, because what's in it for them?

They seed automatically. Based on what subscription you have, they'll maintain a specific ratio. Minimum is 2.0 ratio but better accounts have a 20.0. https://put.io/plans?select=1.1

Only for private trackers. What about public & dht?

Depends where you are in the world. In my country(Poland) downloading any material for your own use is 100% legal.

wow, I didn't know that, thanks for pointing out!

Though BitTorrent always includes uploading, too. That's the really risky part.

Some countries allow you to access any content you have a license for. Especially so for old content that you may personally lack the ability to transfer onto new media formats.

A lot of people mention ability to almost instantly stream the movie you want, but you can already do that using torrents. It's called sequential downloading. After buffering a few % of the whole torrent, you can start watching it with VLC (not sure if other players support it).

Sequential downloading is considered by many to be bad for the health of the torrent [1], and many developers refuse to implement it into their software/libraries [2].

[1] http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Sequential_downloading_is_bad [2] https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/452

That is just silly. It will make the download slower for the majority of people in some weird cases (i.e. bastards that download and stop right away when done, making the end of the files really rare)

That said, I have 7 torrents of pretty uncommon data that is lingering with missing parts. none of the movies, so i doubt it is because someone used sequential download.

Point being, for movies and music, where sequential download would make sense, there is lots of interest so it is harder to be missing pieces.

Sequential downloading defeats one of the primary goals of torrents: to make rare data common. If only one peer has chunk ae986f6ea789 of a torrent, it makes sense that you'd want to download that chunk first in case the peer disconnects before it's fully seeded. Even with movies/music, 70% of the peers may have the first 70% of the movie downloaded, so if you join the swarm it would make sense to throw you at the final 30% in order to increase potential bandwidth to those chunks. I also see overall speed going down as too many peers are requesting the same chunks, when they could be getting other chunks at higher speeds

This argument is moot when you're streaming some blockbuster movie, there will not be any rare chunks to speak of. The client could implement a threshold where sequential downloading is only switched on when there are x number of seeders.

But BitTorrent wasn't invented to stream movies.

Who cares what it was invented for: we can use it for this. If we only ever used tools as intended the world wouldn't have progressed very far.

I agree in spirit, but the idea of everyone starting at the same end of the download does indeed go against some of the core ideas of bit torrent.

Personally I think maybe something should be built on top of bit torrent to accomplish this task. To me it's a case of being careful when re-engineering underlying protocols because of a higher level need.

Anyway, it's a nice hack, but I kind of understand where the client developers who refuse to do this are coming from :-)

Or even a "semi-sequential downloading", X% of the bytes are sequential (say to get smooth streaming), the others are normally downloaded.

There's no need to do purely sequential download, though. You only need to download sequentially at the speed of playback, the rest of your bandwidth can go to the rarest chunks.

You're right, but then you'd need to programmatically determine the video bitrate in the torrent client, or integrate it with the video player. Either way is a pretty heavyweight solution.

So people with non-sequential download would get the end first and have the higher share ratio on the tracker.

why enforce it though? Leechers will be leechers.

When used sparingly (ie on one torrent at a time) it s pretty much ok (since there is also a time-of-start randomization).

Wasn't the idea of the tracker in Bittorrent to decide who gets what chunk, ensure fairness and maximize availability?

Trackers aren't needed anymore. (DHT)

Check out XBMCtorrent then :)

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

EDIT: wrong url

Unfortunately most videos available via torrent typically aren't designed to be streamed. Bitrate and seeking are the two big problems.

Enabling seeking requires logic on the client side to retrieve seek tables as well as encoding that facilitates seeking when streaming.

I will also heartily voice my love of this service. It has totally changed the way I view movies and TV shows.

I'm a technically-inclined person, but I really don't want to spend hours fiddling with torrents. The instant torrent completion is an absolutely killer feature. The UI is easy to use and dead simple. The developers regularly update the site and let us know when there are disruptions.

I'm a "broke" college student, and to be honest, out of all of the online services I pay money for, this is the one I think the least about before purchasing.

movies.io integrates great with put.io. Watch a trailer, click, watch the movie!

how, exactly?

Hey, I was one of the movies.io guys. We did remove the torrenting part of the website more than a year ago.

Before that, you could indeed pick a film, download the torrent in the cloud and directly stream it from our web interface.

Good old days but we all moved on to new challenges.

What special development is required to get a site working with put.io, isn't that the job of the chrome plugin ?

I would love to make

http://tormovies.org/

compatible for registered put.io users

Reply on news.ycombinator.com