Bittorrent Launches Distributed Live Stream

http://live.bittorrent.com/

by sathishmanohar • 15 years ago

115 39 15 years ago

live.bittorrent.com

Groxx3• 15 years ago

So, uh... what is it, and how does it work? I can't find any information, just instructions on downloading the beta client.

thepumpkin19793• 15 years ago

(no wonder why "Call to action" is so underrated these days hehe) Well, if you click in "Download" you will get more information... here, this is for Mac: http://live.bittorrent.com/download_mac.html :)

Groxx3• 15 years ago

More install information, still absolutely nothing about what it actually is or how it does it.

As a side issue... apparently you didn't read the single line of text I had written. Maybe that's why text is so underrated, and everyone tries to simplify things until there's just one button to push, and it's big and colorful?

chrischen• 15 years ago

I think this is like flash multicasting but it doesn't actually work.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

And whatever port it's trying to use that can't be overridden and isn't easily found anywhere is taken on both of my systems.

antimora• 15 years ago

Tried on Ubuntu and it's not working. The video keeps spinning.

joezydeco2• 15 years ago

At least you got it to start. I'm on Karmic and all I get is "cannot execute binary".

Website is pretty, but it would be prettier to show the min requirements.

self• 15 years ago

Chances are you downloaded a 64-bit Linux binary. That happened to me, too.

mikemoka• 15 years ago

The streaming never managed to start and every time I clicked on watch the application was downloaded again (and again).

The saddest thing anyway in my opinion is that the man featured must raise funds for his healthcare, otherwise, his words, "he wouldn't be alive today".

So only rich people have the right to live in US?

And no that's not socialist or communist, it's just common sense because many rich men were just born rich, their families may have been rich from generations, so the "survival of the fittest" doesn't make any sense at all here.

lukifer• 15 years ago

At the risk of sparking pointless political debate: yes, it's nuts, bordering on inhumane.

What's funny is that the same people who vehemently oppose any form of socialized medicine would likely be appalled by the notion of having to pay out of pocket to call the police (or perhaps, monthly crime insurance premiums?). The one that we're used to is so normalized that it's unthinkable to do without, while the other is a scary abomination concocted by foreigners.

In fairness, some libertarians do favor privatizing things like fire and police, in which case I respectfully disagree, but admire their consistency.

lhnn• 15 years ago

With a uniform code of law, and a watcher for the watchers, I think private security for towns and cities can work.

Look at anyone with lots of money: They're already paying for private security services (technological or human) because there isn't much faith in the response time or usefulness of police in many instances.

rick888• 15 years ago

"The one that we're used to is so normalized that it's unthinkable to do without, while the other is a scary abomination concocted by foreigners."

It's different. 100% of the population doesn't need to use the police or fire. I've never had to use either my entire life, but I've gone to the doctor many times.

I don't like the current system, but complete socialization isn't what I want either. When you socialize it completely, private care is truly in the hands of the very rich (because private companies can't compete with the government). Take a look at the UK for a good example of this.

I would like to be able to pay for better care, if I have the money and complete government care means I will have no options but to take what the government gives me, which is usually sub-par (or ends up that way when the government runs out of money).

In addition to this, when something is free (or can't feel it because they are paying money in taxes), people generally don't appreciate it, and in fact, will abuse it. We will have more people in the hospitals for things that don't require medical care with less room for people that actually need it.

I see a parallel with tech support. If you are the tech guy that always helps people out for free, you (the resource) will eventually get tired of helping everyone out for free because people will come to you with questions they could have easily Googled or figured out themselves (like going to the hospital for something that doesn't require a doctor's attention). If you charge money (even if it's a little bit), only the serious people will ask you to do work for them.

I think many people (including myself) got into trouble with credit cards because of this. I would buy things and I it didn't really feel like I was spending money. $20,000 later, I felt it, but it was almost too late by then. It took me 3 years to pay it off. Now, I only spend money that I have and $10 feels like I'm spending $10.

Money is a good way of dividing up a finite resource. Hospitals are a finite resource. If we got rid of the insurance companies, hospitals wouldn't be able to charge $80 for Aspirin, because most people can't afford it. We would see the actual cost for things and the rates for everything would go down.

A small percentage of the population would still need some form of subsidized, government care, but it could easily be supported by the rest of the system.

Nobody will talk about the downsides of universal care. All of the supporters will only talk about how great it is. I want to know both sides and if you can't tell me as a supporter, I'm less likely to listen to you in the future.

ja30278• 15 years ago

Your comment seems to suggest that healthcare is an infinite resource. It isn't. There are a finite number of brilliant surgeons, a finite number of expensive MRI machines, a finite number of hospital beds, etc.

A market is just a means of determining distribution of a rivalrous resource. If it wasn't money, it would be something else (influence, political power, etc).

Having money, in general, is a proxy for the ability to create wealth. Thus, if you can't save everyone, and you have to use some mechanism for choosing who to save, then choosing to save the rich is a decent proxy for saving the people who create wealth. I happen to think that's a better system than some of the others ('who you know', 'how "good" your politics are')

william422• 15 years ago

Well, at the scales we're dealing with, healthcare is an infinite resource. Emergency rooms in the United States cannot turn anyone down, and even uninsured Americans will end up going to the hospital when something serious happens, because the choice is between debt and debilitating illness, people will pick the former.

Wouldn't it be a lot better if we could spend more resources on preventing disease by removing the disincentive for going to the doctor for early detection? Not to mention, with communicable diseases, herd immunity is a very real thing.

sp332• 15 years ago

So only rich people have the right to live in US?

People die here all the time, it's crazy! I've never heard of even one person who lived forever. /s

guard-of-terra2• 15 years ago

There is a chinese program SopPlayer (SopCast) which lets you P2P stream video in digital TV quality, works pretty well and is basically unknown. People here use it to watch football and other sports tv via internet. I think it basically lets you broadcast anything from your PC and other people to watch it, but without having to produce all the traffic.

They didn't even need a loud name to make the technology work.

newhouseb• 15 years ago

Another similar program is PPLive (also primarily Chinese). From a technical perspective it's quite cool stuff (if you google around you can find papers on the implementation and how they deal with buffering, etc) and I'm surprised it hasn't taken off in the US sooner - a great example of China innovating in software (as opposed to the constant copying pointed out by others).

Ravir• 15 years ago

Sopcast is great for P2P streaming, but only works on Windows (or wine).

guard-of-terra2• 15 years ago

That's what you get with Chinese. I guess they just don't see the problem with that. But the underlying tech is very impressive.

fungi• 15 years ago

i used it on linux a couple of years ago to watch world cup (took a bit of fucking around)

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sop+player+linux

http://code.google.com/p/sopcast-player/

Osiris• 15 years ago

It appears that it's currently lacking one important feature: a web peer that kicks off streaming right away.

P2P can certainly lower the bandwidth requirements of the host, but for the user experience to be smooth, the video has to start right away and right now the live client appears to be taking a long time to establish connections with other peers. During that time, the user has to wait.

If the system would download from a dedicated web host in addition to peers, the experience would be much smoother, IMHO. Heck, you could even use the technology to enhance basically anything on the web by using the normal HTTP data stream, but also looking for peers with data from the same URL to increase download speed.

Right now it looks like you need a critical mass of clients viewing the video before it'll even work. I've been sitting on the video for about 5 minutes with any video appearing. My network connection shows several open connections from BTLive, but it's not sending or receiving any data.

tete• 15 years ago

Maybe this is interesting to you:

http://swarmplayer.p2p-next.org/

The W3C also works on standards for P2P distribution. See:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#network

synctext• 15 years ago

http://swarmplayer.p2p-next.org/ Hmm. Refers to Open Source live streaming software (LGPL). That Bittorrent Inc. solution breaks and is closed. How do they want to compete with mature PPLive code?

k_bx• 15 years ago

When I want to watch some sport event -- I don't care if it starts right away or in minute or two. Because often all the online-video channels are just over-loaded. So maybe something like this would solve the problem?

brador• 15 years ago

Agreed. I wouldn't shed a tear over a 30 second buffer.

paul9290• 15 years ago

Not working for me either (Firefox 7 for Mac) the buffer image keeps spinning.

Achshar• 15 years ago

For everyone whose stream isn't working, utorrent shares port with skype, so if you have skype installed then there try changing the port of either of them.

sabret00the2• 15 years ago

P2P Streaming Software:

* StreamTorrent

* SopCast

* TVUPlayer

* Tvants

* Veetle

* PPStream

* UUSEE

* PPlive

* Spvod

Thus BitTorrent is hardly on to a new thing here, but let's hope they can inspire some real improvements as the software is neither perfect nor mainstream.

pixelcort• 15 years ago

Don't forget PeerCast.

I actually remember using PeerCast a long time ago. It was based on the Gnutella protocol IIRC.

The term "peercasting" also seems to have not survived to this day.

sabret00the2• 15 years ago

I purposely left off a lot that has fallen by the wayside. Sopcast and Veetle are by far the most popular today. Veetle is for all intents and purposes Flash based P2P and so it's very popular.

With Adobe's decision to dump support for smartphones, tablets and TVs, we're likely to see a huge push from them in this market, as IIRC they enabled P2P technologies in flash a while back. If Sopcast releases a browser based version, I see no reason why it can't rule the space given it's already overwhelming popularity.

rmc• 15 years ago

This is interesting because the original BitTorrent was an interesting innovation, and it's the same people behind this. So I'm curious what (if any) interesting ideas they've had. But the page is light on details. How does this 'live streaming' differenciate from normal bittorrent?

pwpwp• 15 years ago

I'm curious as to the tech details myself. One problem of classic bittorrent for livestreaming, afaiu, is that it derives its speed from downloading pieces of a file randomly. For livestreaming, you probably need a different algorithm.

tuxidomasx• 15 years ago

Ipv6 nodes require multicasting support. This could be an incomplete solution to a problem that is already on the way out

jknoll• 15 years ago

Hello, all. I'm a software engineer working on BitTorrent's Live protocol. First, thanks for your patience while it's in Beta.

It seems many people in this thread came late to the stream, after the event was over (it was from 8:00pm to 10:00pm Pacific), so that explains why some of you weren't able to view the stream (we're working on adding archives of past streams soon).

If you'd like to be emailed invitations to future events, just fill out the email subscription link here: http://live.bittorrent.com/

If you have ideas or suggestions, you can add or vote on them here: https://bittorrentlive.uservoice.com/

It looks like a lot of you have questions about the technical details of the protocol. I'm not sure how much we're ready to disclose, but I'll mention this to the team and perhaps we can put together a juicier "about" page.

Thanks again.

Bittorrent Launches Distributed Live Stream

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