“It’s not a secret that the blockade in the Middle East prevents vital resources like water, food and medicines going to the needy people in Palestine. But it is perhaps not as general known that normal people who are traveling out of the area are denied a visa,” the festival organizers write in a blog post commenting on the issue. Luckily, with BitTorrent the filmmaker can still follow the festival.

The Norwegian film festival has close ties to the people of Gaza. The festival’s organizers have previously invited its young filmmakers and after the 2008/2009 siege they continued to collaborate on film workshops over the Internet. This year, due to the political situation, they’re going to take it up a notch by offering a BitTorrent-powered live stream to people all over the world, including Gaza.

The BitTorrent stream that the festival will use is facilitated by The Far North Living Lab which has experience with the technology. Last year the lab kicked off with a spectacular experiment in which they used BitTorrent to stream a 2K resolution film onto the big screen, and a few months later they hosted the first BitTorrent-powered live streamed concert.

The Far North Living Lab start their live stream from the festival tonight during the opening. In order to get the stream to Gaza and other parts of the Internet they’ve set up a BitTorrent-powered live stream (approx 1.1mbit h264, full PAL resolution) that will be transmitting from Norway’s oldest still-used cinema. Similar to the previous projects, the lab’s researchers are using the P2P-Next codebase.

“This is an important opportunity to reach our goal for an international awareness of Youth Cinema,” festival director Hermann Greuel told TorrentFreak.

An important aspect is that through the stream young filmmakers in Gaza can follow the festival. “The current stream will not be possible on a central place or event in Gaza due to special permissions from the Gaza government, but the stream is available in Gaza,” he added.

It’s good to see that there are filmmakers and enthusiasts who put BitTorrent to creative use, rather than simply accusing the technology of facilitating copyright infringement.

Readers who want to check out the stream can do so from 6 PM CET.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

BitTorrent is very effective in reducing bandwidth costs and thanks to technology developed by the P2P-Next team, it can also be used to stream TV-shows. Today P2P-Next has launched a new trial where they stream an episode of R&DTV in high definition.

In collaboration with the BBC, who kindly provided a HD episode of R&D TV, the researchers of P2P-Next will use this experiment to gather user feedback and demonstrate that the technology will allow video to be streamed to the public, by the public.

If successful, following further optimization the technology will allow everyone with a standard Internet connection to stream high definition video to thousands of people without having to invest in additional hardware or bandwidth.

“Our ambition level is to craft the next-generation of P2P technology,” P2P-Next scientific director, Dr. Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak. “We hope that our Open Source P2P technology can provide existing user-generated video communities with high quality streaming video.”

Indeed, with this BitTorrent-powered streaming technology it should be fairly easy to create a mashup between The Pirate Bay and YouTube. Thanks to BitTorrent the users take care of the bandwidth, which significantly reduces the costs involved with running a video streaming site.

The current trial is limited to Windows users only, but the streaming plugin will also be available for other platforms in the near future. In order to stream the episode directly from the trial website, users have to install a plugin first, then the R&DTV episode should start to play.

Pouwelse further encourages those who are able to participate in the trial to submit feedback and report bugs. As the technology is only in an early stage of development, problems with some video cards are expected to occur, but it should work fine with the majority.

Those who want to participate can check out the BitTorrent-powered episide of BBC’s R&DTV here. Details on the number of users connected and the bandwidth transferred can be found on the statistics page.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

To add to the excitement there are also plans to use BitTorrent to distribute the show and source material. The BBC is one of the partners in the EU funded P2P-Next research project that uses BitTorrent technology to shape the future of web based TV delivery. BitTorrent is very effective in reducing bandwidth costs and thanks to technology developed by the P2P-Next team it can also be used to stream TV-shows, and even live video.

The BBC is not offering BitTorrent downloads or streams for R&DTV just yet, but they do hope to use P2P-Next (and therefore BitTorrent) for future episodes. This could be done by embedding BitTorrent powered streams in their site or alternatively they could offer regular .torrent downloads.

R&DTV is published in a full 30 minute version and a brief 5 minute edition offering just the highlights. Both are available in various video formats but that’s not all. For every episode, all of the source material – including raw footage not used in the full show – is also included in the so-called asset bundle.

In true BitTorrent style the downloads come with a ASCII art Scene-inspired NFO file disguised as readme.txt. “We’re pretty excited and ask you to please tell us what you do end up doing with the asset bundle, so we can learn what works and what does not work and fix it next time we release another asset bundle,” the BBC writes on the download page where the show is posted.

We applaud the BBC for being one of the few content publishers not to shy away from BitTorrent and file-sharing in general. We’ve previously written about Norwegian state TV that launched its own BitTorrent tracker, but unfortunately they forbid people from redistributing or remixing their shows.

By using a Creative Commons license the BBC seems to understand that this is one of the key elements of 21st century broadcasting, and we hope to see more initiatives like this in the future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.