P2P-Next Introduces Live BitTorrent Streaming
Written by Ernesto on July 18, 2008The Swarmplayer developed by the P2P-Next research group is now capable of streaming live video in true 4th generation P2P style using a zero-server approach. With a $22 million project budget from the EU and partners, the P2P-Next research group intends to redefine how video is viewed on the Internet.
This new breakthrough technology allows everyone to broadcast a live stream, such as a webcam feed, to thousands of people, using around the same amount of bandwidth you would use to stream to one or two people. With SwarmPlayer, the user can simply click on a “live” .torrent file and tune into any live BitTorrent channel. To make this possible, the P2P-Next research group created a new .tstream format which is a regular .torrent with live capability.
The BBC is one of the parties currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, which is part of the P2P-Next project. The scientific director of the project, Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak that it’s not just the BBC interested in this new technology: “We are working with a lot of interested parties. Through the European Broadcasting Union we are getting a lot of feedback. We are expected to do more field trials in the near future.”
If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth. Most importantly, however, is that this technology allows individuals to broadcast their streams to thousands of users, without having to invest in lots of bandwidth. YouTube 2.0, sort of.
Pouwelse further told TorrentFreak that, unlike services such as Joost, they are fully committed to open standard and Open Source. “As a research project we, by definition, need to make things that others don’t already have, without needing to worry about business models,” he said, going on to explain how they got live streaming via BitTorrent to work.
“To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible,” Pouwelse said. “However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.”
“Give-to-Get tries to obtain video blocks just in time for displaying. Tit-for-tat rewards people that give bandwidth to you, which does not work in the streaming case. Instead, Give-to-Get gives bandwidth to people that are nice to others. This is more powerful, but proved to be quite tricky to get working.”
Indeed, streaming a webcam feed is totally different than downloading a huge video file. What the Swarmplayer does is download and buffer one minute’s worth of data, which is then traded with other people in the swarm. The users are actively trading the buffered data.
A key breakthrough was that Dr. Arno Bakker got the “UnDownload()” functionality working. This is needed, because the player has to drop data after a while, since you’re watching a continuous stream. This turned out to require momentous revamping of 7 year old code.”
For those who want to test the BitTorrent live streaming, there is a streaming test where you can tune in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a 5 minute weather report (not live) from the BBC. You can provide feedback and check out some of the statistics here. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are also available.
The Swarmplayer and the BitTorrent live streaming technology are still work in progress. “We hope that we can get this code solid and stable in a month,” Pouwelse said, “then we can focus on the next milestone of sharing ratio enforcement, where we give better video experience to those that upload more.” We will certainly keep an eye on these developments, as it may change the way we watch video online.
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29 Responses
Seems like a cool development.
Yep!
Read this on Ars (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080718-major-eu-p2p-research-project-hopes-to-kill-traditional-tv.html)
good take on it though with good informational links.
Cheers!
eZee.se
Sounds like a pretty decent development, espically if the BBC starts using good old torrent technology.
Another application to embrace p2p…
http://www.alphaboard.co.cc/blog
Comcast now got bigger problem…,
Better they start upgrading their network…
I doubt that this will take off with all of the time for lag and also sending packets once in a stream can be really messed up with a few percent packet loss, however, if there was a 30 second delay this could work a lot better so the internet could pick up the slack.
Is this similar to the technology that applications like TVU Player use?
Daybringer, there is a minute delay so the net can pick up the slack.
Hopefully this will provide a strong buisness model for television stations within a decade, with the stream heading directly into our TVs, a mkv encoded file needs about a 8mbit connection however to stream it and upload atleast equal to that to maintain the peer network without needing to provide extra seeing.
This way, television should be cheaper to transmit and therefore open up to more choice.
Sadly that means we’ll probably see lots of you-tube esq content ^^
Software Downloaded - Tested and Result = really sucks.
Useless technology !
Everyone doesn’t have 100Mbit connection to watch Torrents Live.
> “a mkv encoded file needs about a 8mbit connection however to stream it and upload atleast equal to that to maintain the peer network without needing to provide extra seeing.”
There is no limit (upper or lower) on the bitrate of video in an mkv container.
This seems cool. I want to see this feature in Vuze in the near future.
Well, #3, Good old new torrent technology* ^^
This seems very nice, looking forward to it…
*hungers for video quality*
very positive
This is just the beginning of what you can do with bittorrent technology, when the world finally embraces it, we will see leaps in technology. Its basically the true dream of networking, everything talking to each other (hopefully securely) and sharing information instantly across the world.
Think about how incredible that is..
I’m all for BT, but this is actually incredibly wasteful compared to multicast. Ironically, ISPs who disabled multicast are now going to be hit with even more data, since there will be packets for individual people, as opposed to packets received by many people.
“this is actually incredibly wasteful compared to multicast.”
How wasteful? I keep hearing this, and it is understandable if we are dealing with a swarm of 1000000 people.
However, take a more common example, a medium size swarm with say 1000-10000 people spread out over the size of the UK. How efficent is it to use multicasting then? Especially as you still have to deal with the disadvantages such as UDP/packet loss.
If the media companies start using this to distribute TV shows, they can save on bandwidth and stop harassing us with ads!
…..Right.
streaming ? who cares about streaming ?
I want the files on my hdd, downloaded from my fellow users, and certainly not to give away any kind of marketing data to any company whatsoever.
Privacy istheshit !streaming !
And what next, f’kin’ “targeted” adds in the middle of the shows like on tv ? to hell with that cr4p !
Umm Sopcast PPStream and all of those apps have been up for years… Nothing new here.
http://www.myp2p.eu
significantly we see another good reason why networks cannot throttle the protocol
http://www.h33t.com
Sadly it will never be possible to stream at the bitrate of BT until major ISPs choose to upgrade their networks instead of pocket all of the profits. But hey charging 1+ dollars for a gig when it costs about 1-2 bucks to send the average persons monthly bandwidth across the net.
It seems only Verizon cares about advancing their network well most others only care about throttling and charging per gig instead of progressing their networks to advance into the digital age.
Yay for the duopoly system for it is about as effective towards advancement as the USA’s 2 party system of corruption is.(which is why north America is not number one when it comes to the internetz)
Multicast beats torrents hands down for streaming…in theory.
One single stream could serve thousands of subscribers at the bandwidth cost of one subscriber (of course the stream would duplicate at multicast routers as appropriate). IPTV for example runs exclusively over multicast, but only over local networks.
The problem is that multicast in ipv4 networks simply doesn’t work on a large scale such as the internet.
I tried this software out and even on my slow connection there were no pauses for buffering that i normally see on downloading from the BBC servers. The quality wasnt exactly amazing but it was the same as what BBC normally stream. There were only 20 seeds on the system when i downloaded but despite this it was a smooth download. Popular files like new films will have far more seeds than that, so the technology could be used. Also the key factor is that there is backward functionality on the .tstream files (it worked on utorrent), so people could choose whether to watch it now or later.
The BBC had multicast running a short while ago and it worked quite well. Even the participatory ISPs configured their ends to run it, then the BBC… afaik… decided to stop/drop the trial and instead shifted everything towards their iPlayer (which I’ve never used and am just not as interested in). They didn’t even give any notice to trial particpants about its cessation as far as I know which just left everyone scratching their heads. Cu***.
I’d be surprised if this Tribler thing could match multicast for efficiency. Isn’t there already a huge address space (224/3) set out specifically for this kind of usage?
BTW I did try this client, worked OK I guess but consumed a lot of bandwidth for what it was. I could see it getting real expensive if ever used by any significant number of people for any length of time.
Dude that is too cool man, Free P2P.
JT
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com
Anonymous
summer intresting
next to Future
What ever happened to Joost?
How do i get free songs
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