http://zombtracker.the-zomb.com/tstream.php?id=24354&name=Syd.Barrett.Crazy.Diamond.2008-05-23.BBC4.Omnibus.tstream

Call me old fashioned, but I dont like streaming that much, I like downloading it and having it. Also I hate watching stuff on my computer (I send it over to my HDTV) so if there was a cool interface in which I could choose to stream easily, I would, but im not gonna dig through torrents just to stream them.. im a couch potato.

Even if the technology’s not perfect, it’s a step in the right direction. Television executives are sloooooowly getting on the bandwagon of non-traditional distribution methods, as most networks now stream some or all of their programs online. The problem here, and this is more a problem of antiquated copyright laws, is that legal streams are only available in the country that owns the network. I’d love to legally stream NBC programs from the UK, and when I get back to Canada, I’d love to watch Dr Who on BBC’s iPlayer.

I love to see technology developing to allow global sharing of media, and hopefully as the technology progresses, lawmakers will start to move in a more progressive direction as well.

JT
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

http://ladysmooth.com/

And yes earliest-first in a normal torrent swarm would be less than optimal and it would slow down downloading. But in this case i don’t think its relevant since everyone wants the same pieces and you have the entire length of the movie to download it instead of trying to download it as fast as possible and then watch it.

In regards to some of the comments here. EZTV has a huge initial seeding swarm therefore brand-new torrents will stream fine. Also older torrents with good ratios will stream fine. However, it’s the semi-new torrents with very large numbers of leechers and relatively few seeders that will have difficulties.

a program can only be as good as the people using it so don’t blame the software just because people are assholes

on the other hand it would work realy well on a private site since people there actualy seed!.

I think you’ll probably be right there. I hope you are too. It’s just a concern really, and maybe an irrational one. ;)

A FoxTorrent developer says:

“when there are lots of seeders it works great, but otherwise it’s terrible. This seems more an artifact of the BitTorrent ‘positive amnesiac’ design
(intentionally forgetting downloaders) than any sort of implementation issue.”

The btfs developer says:

“I did some experiments with streaming using BitTorrent. I wrote btfs, which lets me mount a torrent as a FUSE file system, and then access only what I need. In short, the results are excellent if there are generous high-bandwidth seeds and few leaches, and sucks if otherwise.”

That said, there are peer-to-peer protocols designed specifically for video streaming. Joost is perhaps the most notable in practice, however it’s proprietary.

I began working on my own protocol some 5 years ago but haven’t yet managed to popularize it:

http://distribustream.org

There’s also Tribler, which is what P2P Next has thrown their weight behind.

Why anyone would try to convert BitTorrent into a streaming protocol, especially when there are protocols designed to do this from the ground-up, makes absolutely no sense to me.

Correct. It’s just common sense – even the Azureus wiki warns against in-order downloading!

See, for the streaming to work correctly, everyone must have pretty high upload speeds. Almost no one does – I know I’m seeding all my torrents for at least a full day after the download completes just to get 1:1 because my upload speed is so much smaller than my download.

If too many people start using the streaming clients, it will be the same as when people use leeching clients. Bittorrent swarms will die off much too quickly.

Everything you stream (not live) are saved in \Application Data\.SwarmPlayer\downloads and every time you start your client you will start seeding those again.

Only video that is 100% done downloading is saved

Interesting idea, does seem like it could be good to be able to watch the latest episode of [whatever] without having to wait for it to complete, but I wonder about whether users will remain inclined to feed back into the swarm to a 1:1 ratio (to be fair) once they’ve finished watching. It could create a league of hit+runners, intentionally, or not.

Not sure why it was said that the swarmplayer doesn’t allow you to save out the file? There’s a button labelled ‘SAVE’ on the player and afaik (i did test it once) it does let you save the file out, at least after you’ve reached 100% data completion.

You can configure the port, too, if you right-click the systray icon and select options > advanced. You can set an upstream bandwidth limit there also.

Will be interesting to see what becomes of it.

This won’t work on any torrent that contains .rar archives, which is what I would advice everyone to start doing again to put a stop to this type of bullshit.

looks like i got it wrong