
Bittorrent Launches Distributed Live Stream - sathishmanohar
http://live.bittorrent.com/
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guard-of-terra
There is a chinese program SopPlayer (SopCast) which lets you P2P stream video
in digital TV quality, works pretty well and is basically unknown. People here
use it to watch football and other sports tv via internet. I think it
basically lets you broadcast anything from your PC and other people to watch
it, but without having to produce all the traffic.

They didn't even need a loud name to make the technology work.

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Ravir
Sopcast is great for P2P streaming, but only works on Windows (or wine).

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fungi
i used it on linux a couple of years ago to watch world cup (took a bit of
fucking around)

<http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sop+player+linux>

<http://code.google.com/p/sopcast-player/>

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Osiris
It appears that it's currently lacking one important feature: a web peer that
kicks off streaming right away.

P2P can certainly lower the bandwidth requirements of the host, but for the
user experience to be smooth, the video has to start right away and right now
the live client appears to be taking a long time to establish connections with
other peers. During that time, the user has to wait.

If the system would download from a dedicated web host in addition to peers,
the experience would be much smoother, IMHO. Heck, you could even use the
technology to enhance basically anything on the web by using the normal HTTP
data stream, but also looking for peers with data from the same URL to
increase download speed.

Right now it looks like you need a critical mass of clients viewing the video
before it'll even work. I've been sitting on the video for about 5 minutes
with any video appearing. My network connection shows several open connections
from BTLive, but it's not sending or receiving any data.

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k_bx
When I want to watch some sport event -- I don't care if it starts right away
or in minute or two. Because often all the online-video channels are just
over-loaded. So maybe something like this would solve the problem?

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brador
Agreed. I wouldn't shed a tear over a 30 second buffer.

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mikemoka
The streaming never managed to start and every time I clicked on watch the
application was downloaded again (and again).

The saddest thing anyway in my opinion is that the man featured must raise
funds for his healthcare, otherwise, his words, "he wouldn't be alive today".

So only rich people have the right to live in US?

And no that's not socialist or communist, it's just common sense because many
rich men were just born rich, their families may have been rich from
generations, so the "survival of the fittest" doesn't make any sense at all
here.

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lukifer
At the risk of sparking pointless political debate: yes, it's nuts, bordering
on inhumane.

What's funny is that the same people who vehemently oppose any form of
socialized medicine would likely be appalled by the notion of having to pay
out of pocket to call the police (or perhaps, monthly crime insurance
premiums?). The one that we're used to is so normalized that it's unthinkable
to do without, while the other is a scary abomination concocted by
_foreigners_.

In fairness, some libertarians do favor privatizing things like fire and
police, in which case I respectfully disagree, but admire their consistency.

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rick888
"The one that we're used to is so normalized that it's unthinkable to do
without, while the other is a scary abomination concocted by foreigners."

It's different. 100% of the population doesn't need to use the police or fire.
I've never had to use either my entire life, but I've gone to the doctor many
times.

I don't like the current system, but complete socialization isn't what I want
either. When you socialize it completely, private care is truly in the hands
of the very rich (because private companies can't compete with the
government). Take a look at the UK for a good example of this.

I would like to be able to pay for better care, if I have the money and
complete government care means I will have no options but to take what the
government gives me, which is usually sub-par (or ends up that way when the
government runs out of money).

In addition to this, when something is free (or can't feel it because they are
paying money in taxes), people generally don't appreciate it, and in fact,
will abuse it. We will have more people in the hospitals for things that don't
require medical care with less room for people that actually need it.

I see a parallel with tech support. If you are the tech guy that always helps
people out for free, you (the resource) will eventually get tired of helping
everyone out for free because people will come to you with questions they
could have easily Googled or figured out themselves (like going to the
hospital for something that doesn't require a doctor's attention). If you
charge money (even if it's a little bit), only the serious people will ask you
to do work for them.

I think many people (including myself) got into trouble with credit cards
because of this. I would buy things and I it didn't really feel like I was
spending money. $20,000 later, I felt it, but it was almost too late by then.
It took me 3 years to pay it off. Now, I only spend money that I have and $10
feels like I'm spending $10.

Money is a good way of dividing up a finite resource. Hospitals are a finite
resource. If we got rid of the insurance companies, hospitals wouldn't be able
to charge $80 for Aspirin, because most people can't afford it. We would see
the actual cost for things and the rates for everything would go down.

A small percentage of the population would still need some form of subsidized,
government care, but it could easily be supported by the rest of the system.

Nobody will talk about the downsides of universal care. All of the supporters
will only talk about how great it is. I want to know both sides and if you
can't tell me as a supporter, I'm less likely to listen to you in the future.

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william42
"We will have more people in the hospitals for things that don't require
medical care with less room for people that actually need it."

That's actually _the_ problem with the current American system. Because people
have to pay, they avoid going to the doctor early when the care could be
preventative, and instead end up in the emergency room. Healthcare is
something that is cheaper when used frequently.

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sabret00the
P2P Streaming Software:

* StreamTorrent

* SopCast

* TVUPlayer

* Tvants

* Veetle

* PPStream

* UUSEE

* PPlive

* Spvod

Thus BitTorrent is hardly on to a new thing here, but let's hope they can
inspire some real improvements as the software is neither perfect nor
mainstream.

~~~
pixelcort
Don't forget PeerCast.

I actually remember using PeerCast a long time ago. It was based on the
Gnutella protocol IIRC.

The term "peercasting" also seems to have not survived to this day.

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sabret00the
I purposely left off a lot that has fallen by the wayside. Sopcast and Veetle
are by far the most popular today. Veetle is for all intents and purposes
Flash based P2P and so it's very popular.

With Adobe's decision to dump support for smartphones, tablets and TVs, we're
likely to see a huge push from them in this market, as IIRC they enabled P2P
technologies in flash a while back. If Sopcast releases a browser based
version, I see no reason why it can't rule the space given it's already
overwhelming popularity.

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Groxx
So, uh... what is it, and how does it work? I can't find any information, just
instructions on downloading the beta client.

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thepumpkin1979
(no wonder why "Call to action" is so underrated these days hehe) Well, if you
click in "Download" you will get more information... here, this is for Mac:
<http://live.bittorrent.com/download_mac.html> :)

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Groxx
More _install_ information, still absolutely nothing about what it actually is
or how it does it.

As a side issue... apparently you didn't read the single line of text I had
written. Maybe that's why text is so underrated, and everyone tries to
simplify things until there's just one button to push, and it's big and
colorful?

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thepumpkin1979
haha I know right, text... text is underrated too. I don't have time to read a
full page with information about a new project because I don't know anything
about it yet, I don't even know if I'm interested. I like to talk to landing
pages like this: "let me try the thing, tell me how to download it, signup,
connect or whatever gives me some interaction with the product(without
scrolling, without reading 20 lines of meaningless text)" because If I'm
interested then I will read all the docs, reviews and architecture papers you
want. Is not a wikipedia page, it's a product launch and guess what: It didn't
work for me in my mac =)

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Groxx
Which is why a call to action is handy. But without even an "about" link
somewhere? I can't _find_ the docs, reviews, or architecture papers. They seem
to just want you to download and install this thing called "live" that does
something that they won't even describe, and run it. That's just a bad landing
page.

~~~
thepumpkin1979
Right, there is no "about" link :(. It's just like any other landing page for
a very disappointing content/product.

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jknoll
Hello, all. I'm a software engineer working on BitTorrent's Live protocol.
First, thanks for your patience while it's in Beta.

It seems many people in this thread came late to the stream, after the event
was over (it was from 8:00pm to 10:00pm Pacific), so that explains why some of
you weren't able to view the stream (we're working on adding archives of past
streams soon).

If you'd like to be emailed invitations to future events, just fill out the
email subscription link here: <http://live.bittorrent.com/>

If you have ideas or suggestions, you can add or vote on them here:
<https://bittorrentlive.uservoice.com/>

It looks like a lot of you have questions about the technical details of the
protocol. I'm not sure how much we're ready to disclose, but I'll mention this
to the team and perhaps we can put together a juicier "about" page.

Thanks again.

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rmc
This is interesting because the original BitTorrent was an interesting
innovation, and it's the same people behind this. So I'm curious what (if any)
interesting ideas they've had. But the page is light on details. How does this
'live streaming' differenciate from normal bittorrent?

~~~
pwpwp
I'm curious as to the tech details myself. One problem of classic bittorrent
for livestreaming, afaiu, is that it derives its speed from downloading pieces
of a file randomly. For livestreaming, you probably need a different
algorithm.

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antimora
Tried on Ubuntu and it's not working. The video keeps spinning.

~~~
joezydeco
At least you got it to start. I'm on Karmic and all I get is "cannot execute
binary".

Website is pretty, but it would be prettier to show the min requirements.

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self
Chances are you downloaded a 64-bit Linux binary. That happened to me, too.

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joezydeco
Thanks. Didn't know that. I guess BTLive didn't, either.

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Achshar
For everyone whose stream isn't working, utorrent shares port with skype, so
if you have skype installed then there try changing the port of either of
them.

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tuxidomasx
Ipv6 nodes require multicasting support. This could be an incomplete solution
to a problem that is already on the way out

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paul9290
Not working for me either (Firefox 7 for Mac) the buffer image keeps spinning.

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drivebyacct2
And whatever port it's trying to use that can't be overridden and isn't easily
found anywhere is taken on both of my systems.

