

Ask HN: please review my technology. - casta

Thinking about the latest video streaming news, I thought about a feasible way to reduce the costs related to video distribution.<p>I wanted to use p2p to reduce bandwith while retaining a simple user experience, staying in the browser.
The only feasible solution I saw was to use a Java applet,
Although it wasn't maybe the best option from the user experience perspective, I have to admit the latest JVM update has reasonable startup time and I also saw some users that didn't even realize that it was java (that's good).<p>If you want to see the result, you can take a look at a few samples here: http://www.bitlet.org/video<p>Please note that data is downloaded via bittorrent, if you have it blocked by a firewall, you won't be able to see anything :°(<p>I'd really like to know what you think about the product, what you would change, any feedback, idea, or critic.<p>Thank you
======
swombat
Out of curiosity, why did you use Java rather than Flash/Flex? Do you know
that Flash 10 has some p2p distribution technology built in?

More info at: [http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/05/flash-10-p2p-and-
cd...](http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/05/flash-10-p2p-and-cdns-deeper-
analysis.html)

------
barrybe
Some thoughts:

1) Being forced to click "Trust" just to watch a video is pretty bad, and
would turn away many of your users.

2) Having an alert box "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" is also
pretty bad, and unnecessary.

Overall, I can see the value that this technology gives to you (less
bandwidth). But what value do you give to the consumer? Why would I want to
endure the various hassles of this site, and give up some my scarce upstream
bandwidth, when I could just go to Youtube or Vimeo instead?

~~~
casta
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

1) You're right: It's bad, but in order to open connections to different
clients it needs a signed applet. I also considered a custom plugin but I
thought forcing a user to install it could be ever worse. Do you have any
better idea?

2) True, will remove it.

I think reducing publisher's costs could lead to benefits even for consumers,
I'm thinking about hd videos.

~~~
ErrantX
Dont forget many ISP's HATE torrenting and P2P. I ran a small ISP in our
village a year or so back before BT got of their bums and 90% of the BW was
used by 5% of the users - through torrenting. It _really_ hammers a network.

If you employed this technology & it took off I suspect you would be faced
with very angry ISP's who may well ban access from their networks.

Plus of course it eats right into the users BW - they theoretically will
upload more than they download and with limited BW allowances people could
easily start gettign traffic shaped without even knowing why!

That said it's a neat solution to the BW problem.. something of a catch 22.

~~~
sp332
Bittorrent doesn't eat bandwidth, stupid users who can't configure their
torrent clients properly eat bandwidth.

~~~
ErrantX
nah, it really does :) think how much outbound data there is, it really fouls
up the local part of the network.

~~~
sp332
Amount of outbound data? If you're sharing a video, the outgoing stream should
be equal to the incoming stream (you're downloading from one place and
uploading somewhere else simultaneously). On average, peers must upload
exactly as much as they download.

~~~
chris11
Technically it is zero sum, but bittorrent prioritizes peering based on how
fast your internet connection is. So somebody on dial-up internet probably
isn't going to upload to anyone, while someone who has high speed internet is
going to upload to many people. So somebody with high speed internet access
might upload twice as much data as they downloaded.

And while I don't think ISPs really care about you maxing out a phone line,
they will notice you maxing out a broadband line. And bittorent will do that.

------
growt
Youtube still burns millions in traffic costs every day, so I think your
technology really makes sense. But I would rather try to perfect it and then
sell it to one of the big video sites, than try to start a new video site on
my own.

------
markessien
Takes a very long time to download and there is no progress bar that tells me
how far along it is. The lack of a progress bar makes it bad. I have no idea
if this will take 2 days or it will be done in a minute. Pushing play also
locked up my browser.

And why use Theora? Most clips are MPEG-4, reencoding to theora will cause
quality loss, so your video player will always be associated with poor
quality.

You have a very good idea, but there are a few major flaws.

What applet are you using? Did you program it yourself?

~~~
casta
I know that lack of a progress bar is a problem, but please note that it's a
prototype I built in my spare time.

I used theora because I wanted a free video codec.

The bittorrent client is coded by myself with help and support from a friend,
the video codec is jheora from fluendo, it also uses jogg and jorbis from
jcraft.

------
bigbang
<http://www.bitlet.org/video>

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dbyrnehume
It might be worth considering why the BBC tried, and then abandoned this
approach with their iPlayer application. More details from the link below, but
the bottom line is that consumers didn't like having their bandwidth allowance
used up and CPU loaded by having to act as servers...

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/12/introducing_i...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/12/introducing_iplayer_deskto.html)

------
thorax
I think this is an interesting technology. There are some naysayers here, but
I think there are some cases that users will accept signing statements and the
like for this.

A public site like youtube or even Hulu wouldn't be able to make it a default
client with those issues given how well Flash works, but I can see some other
sites living with those prompts, especially if they offered low-res Flash and
hires Bitlet.

Especially in a private account situation like Netflix, users would be more
likely to accept those kind of prompts to see the videos they want in higher
quality.

I'm impressed with how well it worked for me, though it's difficult to tell
how much of the viewing was improved through peer-to-peer.

Good work, I think you could build something around this with the right
contacts and impressive test results to show the real benefits.

------
anamax
> Thinking about the latest video streaming news, I thought about a feasible
> way to reduce the costs related to video distribution.

(1) Do you think that this idea is new?

(2) If it is not new (and it isn't), why did previous efforts seemingly fail?
Is your effort going to have those problems?

WRT Flash 10, it's tied to Adobe servers, at least for now. On the other hand,
it's likely to be installed on a large fraction of the web.

I'm somewhat surprised that Silverlight doesn't (yet?) have P2P support that
is server agnostic. (This would give developers/sites a reason to use
silverlight instead of flash.)

I keep expecting a "not-IE" browser to include a P2P javascript extension.

If either happens, I expect that the other will happen in short order.

------
thorax
Have you looked at also making the Java applet support bittorrent for just
file downloads itself? If no one is doing that already, a really slick looking
web interface for file downloads might get more corporations interested in
using BitTorrent for their own file distribution.

~~~
casta
I did it: <http://www.bitlet.org>

~~~
thorax
You need to get out and start showing this to people. You may even want to
start talking to some of the CDN companies to see if they want to license
this. Some of them already have other approaches for P2P bandwidth sharing,
but it would be another bag of tricks with a decent user experience that
companies would consider for large files.

Even if the CDN people don't like this, half the torrent sites out there would
be better served if they had a tool like yours for quick downloads of the
torrent.

I'd really focus on selling the improved user experience side, though. Ideally
the end user doesn't even know that a .torrent is involved in the download.
It's just another background/confusing aspect that users don't need to see.

I think companies will need a way to configure a fallback option for when BT
isn't working for the user, but I think that's all just features that could
eventually be worked into the mix pretty well.

------
stonemetal
Why use bit torrent? It shuts down and reopens connections after each chunk
meaning there is a good bit of overhead that could be avoided. Second using
bit torrent doesn't play well with some home routers for the same reason.

~~~
dryicerx
BitTorrent will usually always work for downloads no matter what. It's the
seeding that doesn't work too well with home routers that doesn't have the
correct port forwarding or Upnp setup.

It's a hybrid between BT and S3. The S3 will keep feeding the data down if
there are peers or not, but if there are peers already watching, then it will
utilize them as well.

I don't think this will work well for YouTube where there are millions of
small videos, but for large Video distribution like NetFlix and Hulu, would be
perfect.

~~~
stonemetal

      >BitTorrent will usually always work for downloads no matter what.
    

Not quite, some fairly popular home routers have issues where they don't have
enough ram and crash rather than loose NAT data. Which really isn't a problem
until you run a (stupidly) high connection protocol like bit torrent.

So yeah it works if they reboot their router and restart the download but that
isn't what you want to do in a youtube like app.

------
RobGR
I think the idea is sound.

However, my experiences with Java have been so consistently horrible that I
won't bother to try it as is. If you make a native application that I can
install, and make sure the download is a few megabytes at most, I will try it.
It sounds like a good idea.

------
aheilbut
see <http://www.octoshape.com> \- CNN used it to stream the Obama
inauguration.

