6 ms·
Weird, a friend of mine used to stream with utorrent years ago without problems. Maybe one pause of a few seconds for a whole TV episode. The problem is not th
by alecco 10y ago
Weird, a friend of mine used to stream with utorrent years ago without problems. Maybe one pause of a few seconds for a whole TV episode.
The problem is not the protocol but the lack of features like subtitles. And torrent contents not being standard. All this can be easily scripted to cover most cases.
- batbomb 10y agoIf somebody was a genius, they'd write a bittorrent content delivery software that arbitrages those pauses with preloaded ads.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoAnd then someone would come along a few days later with a client that doesn't display those ads.
- astro1138 10y agoYou'd still have to wait for the first block of data (piece in BitTorrent lingo) to complete.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoI'd rather have a buffering symbol than an ad.
- milansuk 10y agoNice one! Plus you would not have to download ad.
- tomc1985 10y agoNo!
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoThe problems are not for the individual user, but for the rest of the group. By downloading blocks in sequential order, it guarantees that the last blocks will be rarer on average, which is bad for collective performance.
- joosters 10y agoIt doesn't have to be that bad. Users are likely to have more bandwidth available than is needed to stream the file (if they didn't, then the streaming will never work). Unlike simple HTTP streaming, the clients can use this spare bandwidth to download some blocks from the end of the file, even when streaming from near the start. So a sensible torrent streamer can still ensure that later blocks are not too rare.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoI take your point. It's certainly not the end of the world, but it is sub-optimal.
- __s 10y agoThe increase in seeds from a more ergonomic protocol offsets the downside. Especially if the population has mostly the early blocks, but most of the population wants the early blocks, then there's room for much leech/leech sharing
- rawnlq 10y agoGuys guys hear me out ... the solution is to use "middle in" (not to be confused with middle out from Pied Piper). If you download from front and back simultaneously only the middle blocks would be scarce and you still get at least half your original streaming rate. And no weirdo will stop watching midway through a movie.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoThat doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it around. A reasonable compromise would be to use any "spare" bandwidth to fetch random blocks.
- agumonkey 10y agoThe BitX program seems to handle subtitles outside of the container and protocol (some webservice I guess).