

Adobe Flash To Eliminate Bandwidth Costs With P2P - ukdm
http://torrentfreak.com/adobe-flash-to-eliminate-bandwidth-costs-with-p2p-100519/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29&utm_content=Twitter

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billybob
I'm not a huge fan of flash, but I do think peer-to-peer is a great way for
the web to grow. Anything legitimate - making it harder for ISPs to say "it's
only for pirates" and throttle it - is welcome in my book.

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ErrantX
Actually, as someone who used to help run a mico-ISP, the problem with P2P for
ISP's has little to do with piracy.

The major problem is it can absolutely rape networks - and it only takes one
or two abusers to clog it up for everyone else.

In the end we simply kicked anyone who consistently ate up bandwidth with P2P
- and network reliability improved no end.

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boredguy8
Help me understand this. Did you not have bandwidth caps?

I understand how 'one or two abusers' could clog up a network at, say, a
university where there might not be per-port or per-device limits on
bandwidth.

But I pay my $40/mo. for 10 down 1 up, and I never get more than that. How
does, say, seeding WoW updates 'clog it up for everyone else'?

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ErrantX
P2P is a deliberately greedy process - you are consistently opening a large
number of connections (as opposed to a single high volume connection).

One of the big issues with P2P is not the downloads per-se but the discovery
process - that can seriously hammer the network (imagine how you stress test a
server!)

Also; it's entirely infeasible to offer a service as you describe - partly
because networks just don't work like that (this answers the other commenter
too).

ADSL is a shared line; what other people are doing can adversely impact you
regardless of the networks theoretical capability.

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sreque
As someone who has studied P2P, none of this make sense to me. If I remember
correctly, the Bittorrent protocol tries to maintain only a handful of
connections at any given time. Parallel browser downloaders are capable of
opening more connections.

Also, I don't see how the discovery process would stress a network. I would
expect the actual download to place much more load on the server. For
instance, I could be wrong, but I think a bittorrent client only needs to
contact a tracker to discover other peers. Every iteration after, the client
will try exactly one new peer. That hardly sounds stressful at all!

The last point you make is the only one I agree with. You've offered your
users more theoretical bandwidth than you can actually deliver, which is
common practice. Whether they are trying to use that bandwidth watching
youtube videos or downloading with a P2P client, they will be using more
bandwidth than you can handle.

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ErrantX
Yeh, I probably didnt explain myself well..

> Parallel browser downloaders are capable of opening more connections

This is mostly what I was referring to. Light P2P users are not a problem -
it's the heavy users that cause impact. We had a guy who was torrenting 1000's
of files; essentially flooding the network with connections.

~~~
sreque
Oh, well, that's a different problem entirely :). Although I guess it's much
harder to start 1000 downloads in a browser, theoretically it's possible!

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lukeqsee
I wonder how many people will just "click yes" and end up not being able to
watch video anymore. In the US of A, there are quite a few connections that
are too slow on the upload side to handle P2P while streaming video.

The idea is worthy, but it needs masterful implementation. It takes a lot to
balance the upload/download speeds. I am thankful it will be a opt-in. I just
hope they throughly explain it to users _before_ they click "yes."

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DanBlake
Stratus is non commercial. If you want to use p2p for a commercial project
(show ads/charge for something), you need to pay adobe based on the minutes of
usage (Seriously).

Its called adobe lifecycle afaicr.

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ilike
Omegle and chatroulette, both use Adobe Stratus . Both sites depend on
advertising revenue.

I dont think Adobe actively bans commercial projects/products from using
Straus. Stratus is in beta, and Adobe doesnt provide any official support. So
if you want to run a business that uses RTMFP with Adobe support, then LCCS
(LiveCycle Collaboration Services) is the way to go.

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ryoshu
And Flash Media Server 4 will have RTMFP when it is released. red5 should
offer support soon after that.

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not_an_alien
More information <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/>

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othello
If this delivers on its promise, couldn't it preserve Flash as a standard for
video delivery online?

Cutting bandwidth costs for video websites could be a significant incentive to
slow down HTML5 adoption and keep Flash in the game a little while longer.

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someone_here
Unless HTML5 comes up with a UDP websocket protocol :D

That could be fun, but also possibly a huge security concern.

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est
> Unless HTML5 comes up with a UDP websocket protocol :D

And passive mode for WebSocket. And NAT traversal, and a central coordinate
server, and fuck it, let's just use Flash.

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eli
The beta of this technology is what powers chatroulette, right?

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someone_here
Probably not. To enable this P2P, the user must accept a separate dialog
window asking their permission.

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anto1ne
chatroulette uses stratus, or at least used it. When it became famous, it
completely killed stratus server which was still in beta and not ready for
massive usage. Everyone who happens to use stratus at this time complained.

So stratus is using p2p, but it still rely on Adobe servers and as far as I
know there is no way to deploy your own stratus server yet.

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someone_here
It's been coming for over a year:
<http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/>

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est
I think it's refreshing because it will soon support intranet p2p, both live
and on-demand.

On-demand p2p is easier than live p2p.

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gvb
"...enable publishers to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs by outsourcing
media distribution to users."

That is a very bad title. All it does is _shift_ the bandwidth costs from the
publishers to the users. BBC tried to do this and caused problems for their
users. BBC was surprised by the problems they caused, everybody technical said
"we told you so."

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ryoshu
Stratus has been around for over a year on Adobe Labs. P2P video and audio was
introduced in Flash Player 10. FP 10.1 introduces multi-cast P2P and the
ability to send arbitrary data over the P2P connection.

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braindead_in
How long till someone comes up with a Skype clone on flash?

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ryoshu
There were a number of us that built a Skype clone right after the initial
Stratus release. Video/audio/text chat works pretty well over P2P, but you
still need a centralized server for the initial connection (Stratus) and a way
to get around firewalls (STUN/TURN).

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braindead_in
Awesome. What happened to it?

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hackermom
"Eliminate bandwidth costs" sounds like your ordinary, exaggerated,
sensationalistic marketing trick - just air. I also wonder how this will fare
in the US and the UK, where internet infrastructure on the upstream side of
things is more or less non-existant.

