[vlmc-devel] TeamCollab patch for VLMC

[mattbrun05 at gmail.com]

Thanks all for your support! It's very encouraging :D
We also look forward to integrate our patch in the main stream, and
why not, maybe make some more improvements to the basic idea (see
later).

@Hugo: The irc guy is me, Matteo (ostix). About the video fetching I
think you are right. We actually didn't implement it since we didn't
have so much time, and we focused on proving that our idea was
"doable". As I'll mention below, it's one of the improvements we
already thought about that is missing in our implementation.

@Ludovic: yep, libTorrent is used by the rTorrent BitTorrent client,
but we used the libtorrent from rasterbar
(http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libtorrent/), which is behind at
least Deluge and qTorrent clients. We used this library since it's
multi-platform, written in C++, fast and quite easy to use, and one of
our goals was to be cross-platform (that's also one of the reasons why
we chose VLMC :) ). With this platform it is still possible to make
both client and server. Moreover, it can be mainline DHT capable
(that's one of the features behind the file distribution without
trackers). So in theory it might be used to make the video
distribution transparent to the user, but the implementation should be
studied a little bit more than what we did...

To make the things short, these are some of the big improvements we
thought might be implemented in the future:
- trying to understand how to better manage the conflict cases;
- transparent multimedia files distribution implementing a
client/server class in VLMC, thanks to libtorrent library;
- increase version control systems support;
- go further with our idea, trying to implement a real-time sharing
system: XML project file distributed over a chat (i.e. XMPP) or P2P
communication protocol, and multimedia files automatically shared
through the internal implemented BitTorrent client/server, when VLMC
recognises that the media library has changed (all this obviously
transparent to the final user ;) ).

Again thanks for your opinions! If you have anything else to tell us,
just let us know :D

Best regards,
Matteo and Martin