[vlc-devel] [Videolan-devel] Bittorrent VoD

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

Le mardi 22 décembre 2009, Marijn Swenne a écrit :
> I'm looking into making a Bittorrent VoD integration for VLC. So in
> other words, being able to open a BT metafile in VLC as you would a
> HTTP file and start viewing it before the whole file is downloaded.
> Obviously you'de need a BT client that supports VoD. I was looking
> into using http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libtorrent/ which has a
> BSD-license and modifying it to become a VoD client.

In my understanding, the BitTorrent protocol is fundamentally 
incompatible with video on demand. VoD requires data to be fetched 
linearly. BitTorrent fetches file chunks starting from the scarcest to 
the most commonly available. This enables users to trade chunks, thus 
maximizing the bandwidth usage. But then, you need to fetch the 
complete video file before you can play it with a media player. Then, 
VLC will be just worse than a dedicated BitTorrent client.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/