Torrentocracy = RSS + Bit Torrent + Your TV 172
lerhaupt writes "I've started a project called Torrentocracy which is the combination of RSS, Bit Torrent and your Television. It's written as a plugin for MythTV (the homebrew Linux PVR project). This means you can not only easily find out about new torrents from various enclosure enabled blogs, but you can also start the torrent download process with the click of your TV remote control. Are RSS aggregators which support torrent downloads the next greatest thing since web browsers? What is the significance of hooking this directly to your TV? Here's a screenshot."
Interface (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't look at the screen shot though. been
Easily Tracked? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thoughts?
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Appropriateness of torrents for this, and legals (Score:3, Interesting)
1. I thought torrents randomly sent chunks from all over the file, rather than as a stream. Wouldn't this make no sense unless you wanted to wait forever for the program to be completely downloaded ?
2. Given the large amount of copyrighted programs made available on torrent networks, isn't this an effort to make mainstream what might be otherwise illegal ? Does it make sense to put this amount of effort into support of what might be intended to be an illegal activity for most ?
I would have RTFA but its slashdotted, so I couldn't confirm for myself how torrents are an appropriate medium, and whether the issues of widespread support for copyright violations are addressed.
Comparatively little use of BT for Warez (Score:5, Interesting)
BitTorrent has successfully been used to provide everything from ISOs for distros to large commercial game demos.
The use of BT for transmitting illegal warez etc has been minimal mainly because BT requires a larger number of people to be interested in the particular warez than most P2P software for a download to work.
Its worth remembering that the primary use of BT is to get large files out to large numbers of people as soon after a given date as possible (while using the minimum of initial bandwidth).
What the article is actually getting at tho is that the PVR can be used to easily start a BT download on another (perhaps headless) machine to which the TV/PVR is networked.
Its convenient and useful but hardly revolutionary in this case.
Re:Bad rep (Score:5, Interesting)
Bit torrent, however can serve up the 400+ mb file within an hour and the developers can just set up the link to the seed from their site. It carries an air of legitimacy greater than you can achieve by saying "or look for the file on eMule".
Large-Scale Distribution System for Indie TV (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:i love the idea of torrents but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Conincidentally, being able to prefer one file over another is one of the reasons that we have poorly-seeded torrents to begin with.
The mainline BT client does not support this becuase it interferes with it's rarest-first algorithms. It will download the pieces that are in danger of falling off the network before it will download a more common piece.
I agree that preferring files may be a useful feature from the user's point of view, but it's still a selfish thing to do, and makes the 99%-and-no-seed problems worse and more frequent with it's use.
Broadcatching with BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
http://scottraymond.net/archive/4745 [scottraymond.net]
After addressing the initial whys and wherefores, I speculate on how the pairing might be potent enought to spark an indie media revolution. Here's the text:
-- RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo.
The other day, Steve Gillmor wrote about BitTorrent and RSS and how they could be combined to create a "disruptive revolution." He's half right. RSS and BT are indeed two great tastes that taste great together, but Gillmor's vision is upside down: we shouldn't use BitTorrent to carry RSS, we should use RSS to carry BitTorrent. Let me explain.
-- But first, some background.
RSS (RDF Site Summary) is a simple format for syndicating content on the web. These days, the most common application of RSS is subscribing to weblogs: you tell your computer to check an RSS file for changes every so often, and then it notifies you when there's something new to read. If you're like me and you read one metric shitload of news every day, this is a life-saver.
BitTorrent, the brainchild of Bram Cohen, is the current cool-kids' P2P program. It works sort of like Kazaa, but at a lower level. It doesn't handle searching for new files, it doesn't have a media player, it just concentrates on downloading big files efficiently.
Okay. Two solutions in search of a problem. Here's a problem:
-- I have a weakness.
I am addicted to the show Alias. I watched the first couple episodes of season two as it aired, and I was hooked. In my honest moments, I'll admit that the show's appeal is mostly due to the callipygian Jennifer Garner. It's a weakness; we deal.
But it gets worse. I go out on Sunday nights, when Alias airs, and I don't want to give that up. That's why God created the VCR, I know, but to compound the problem, I don't have TV. I don't want to have TV, because I love the feeling of superiority that I get by not having it.
This system is at tension, it has no rest, its forces are unbalanced, it wants to be resolved.
-- A partial answer.
The internet, it turns out, is great at resolving different kinds of tensions, and this is one of them. After a few weeks of missed episodes, I realized that with a little patience, a P2P program like Kazaa was able to fetch back-episodes with aplomb. Each file is around 450 megs, fairly high-quality video, with commercials cut out. I start a few episodes downloading, and by the next evening, they're ready to watch, whenever I have the time.
After a few weeks of enjoying this, a new tension emerged: I had caught up with all of the old episodes, and I had to wait a week for each new one. The problem is that the Kazaa protocol isn't especially well-tuned for getting brand new files: first someone has to record the show as it airs, cut out the commercials, and compress it to a reasonable size, then seed it on the network. Then, it has to slowly propagate to its peers, each transfer taking hours. It might take three days before it's available on enough peers that I'm able to even find it, let alone download it.
-- BitTorrent to the rescue.
The solution is BitTorrent. BitTorrent operates on similar principles to Kazaa, but it's tuned differently: it excels at downloading files that are new or currently in high demand. It breaks large files into many small chunks, and coordinates their assemblage, so that users can tap into a swarm and distribute the load evenly. At the same time that you're downloading a chunk, another user is downloading an earlier chunk from you -- no one server is overwhelmed, and the more popular a file, the higher its availability is. It's perfect for large files that are most interesting when they're fresh -- in other words, it's perfect for TV shows.
In many cases, I have been able to use BitTorrent to completely download a new TV show mere hours after the show airs.