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

[Andre-John Mas]

On 22-Dec-2009, at 14:29, Juan Cristóbal Olivares wrote:

> 2009/12/22 Rémi Denis-Courmont <rem at videolan.org>
>        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.
> 
> AFAIK, there's a variant for streaming (.tstream files). Take a look:
> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/27/eztv-allows-bittorrent-streaming/ 

I also wonder to what extent Apple's "HTTP Streaming Architecture" could
be adapted:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StreamingMediaGuide/

The idea being that you use the same segmented approach, but use P2P
approach for deciding where to get the missing segment for the portion
you are trying to play, or simply randomising the source addresses
for each segment based on available hosts.

André-John