Comments on: BitTorrent Live: streaming video that gets easier to serve as more people watch it

By: austinhamman

austinhamman — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:45:00 +0000

there are, to my knowledge, no streaming sites that use broadcast or multicast…largely because there are few routers capable to receiving multicast or multicasting. same for broadcast.
instead you make a connection to say youtube and it opens a TCP socket to a streaming location and downloads it. youtube downloads only a portion of it at a time but basically with any streaming site the player downloads some chunk or all of it and plays that, so long as the transfer rate is >= the playback rate all is good.

By: Gilbert Wham

Gilbert Wham — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:10:00 +0000

Another voice here for ‘hasn’t this been an option for ages’?

By: DC Wilson

DC Wilson — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:52:00 +0000

Yeah, go try it first before praising it. The software is indeed a ways of from being usable. Requires ports being opened on routers and firewalls that ISP’s will hit the panic button on almost instantly.

By: kb

kb — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:21:00 +0000

Still don’t know why NPR doesn’t do something like this for its podcasts. I actually emailed one of the producers about it and they gave me some reason for not doing it (which was silly). Sure would cut down on bandwidth costs and all those pledge drives.

By: Gerald Mander

Gerald Mander — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:21:00 +0000

Yah, Vuze does this.

By: Zak McKracken

Zak McKracken — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Okay, I’m obviously not very knowledgeable in this area: I always thought that livestreams were broad- or multicasts, and that the video only has to leave the host computer once and will be duplicated at every router on the internet that has recipients at the end of more than one route.
… is that wrong? Is there a limit to how many people you can reach this way? Are the headers of multicast packets so large that they are a problem?

Anyway, this is in fact good news. The problem is of course that you’d still need enough upstream bandwidth to send the video at least as fast at it is running. Meaning, most people won’t be able to do this using their connection at home, unless the video is very small. Although it may be a very cool thing for people with small websites on small servers with not much bandwidth. (Did I at least get this right?)

By: Rider

Rider — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:08:00 +0000

You don’t it’s streams the files using peers. You watch it as the pieces come in.

By: Cameron Postelwait

Cameron Postelwait — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:58:00 +0000

is it still considered streaming if you have to receive the full file before you can use it?

By: Rider

Rider — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:39:00 +0000

Welcome to 4 years ago. This has been built into to most torrent clients for years now. Bittorent is usually the last to catch up with the technology they created. I’ve been streaming NFL games this way for the past two years.

By: signsofrain

signsofrain — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:42:00 +0000

I’ve been waiting for this. YouTube’s usefulness has been hugely diminished by the copyright police and crappy unskippable advertising. A decentralized streaming video site would be amazing.

1) Create decentralized takedown-resistant streaming video site
2) Mirror all of YouTube’s video
3) ~~Profit~~ Enjoy the social disruption caused by democratizing streaming