Video on Demand ... BT Style :) (1 Viewer)

[BillyGates]

Here's a big 'Feature Wish' that I'll put out there... I came up with this while going to sleep last night... so I was thinking 'pie in the sky'

It would be -very- nice I someone customized (or maybe one could do this with an Azureus plugin) to Download Torrents Left to Right. I did an eMule mod to allow nice previewing of videos to download AVI's, by DLing the first 'chunk' then the last 'chunk' (you need about the last 1MB of an AVI file), then download the rest of the file Left to Right.

If this was integrated with MediaPortal so you can then view this videos while downloading, this would provide a very nice 'Video on Demand' solution.

I have a 4Mbps Internet connection and can download 45 minute ~350MB 'videos' in about 15-30 minutes...

So it would be very nice if the wifey says I want to see blah blah show now, and I could drop a .torrent file into a directory and Media Portal within 1 minute could probably download enough and start playing the video.

Let me know how 'far out' you think this suggestion might be. All the tools are there... someone just has to put it all together!

 

[BoelShit]

Think problem with torrents is that the speed fluctuates depending on seeds/peers etc... Cant never really predict it.

 

[BillyGates]

You just need to be on the right sites. Most good private sites I'm on (that track ratios) I have to limit my download speed because they can easily swamp my download capacity.

Public torrent sites don't usually have this 'problem' of having to limit Download speed, but private ones do.

 

[tkortell]

Is it not better to just subscribe to you favourite show and the latest episode is automatically downloaded for you to watch when ever you have time? Ok, 'Video on Demand' would be sweet but I don't see it happening with torrents.

Just my opinion

Regards / Tomas

 

[arkay]

I'd love to bittorrent channels integrated as other channels in the TV guide. Just set it to "record" every instance of a particular show and in the background they get downloaded and added to your "to watch recorded shows" same as live TV would.

You'd only need to add extra channels to your guide (that you don't receive locally) that host the shows you're interested in (ie. the Sci Fi channel), then tag it as "not locally broadcast" so it would go off to BT and grab the shows you want to see when they become available.

That way you see when they are actually broadcast, when there are breaks etc etc on the real channel...

The naming of the torrents would be the biggest issue but with consistent naming conventions that many of the guys like eztv use it could be made to work.

Just an idea at any rate.

Cheers,

Arkay.

 

[BillyGates]

If you're looking at just 'recording' via BitTorrent you can essentially do this by using torrent sites that support RSS feeds, and with the correct filtering, automatically downloading torrents into a folder that MP can access.

I'm really looking at a customized BT app that downloads left to right so you can easily preview/watch while downloading.

 

[jawbroken]

I really don't agree with downloading bittorrent files left to right as this essentially breaks the algorithm to evenly distribute pieces to maximise bandwidth and provide redundancy for everyone on the tracker. This will have a negative impact on swarm speeds and reliability if it becomes widespread. In fact, if I were running a private tracker then I would consider this cheating because of its negative impact on the swarm as a whole and is essentially just greedy. Is 15-30 minutes really too long to wait for a file to download? If you want the file left to right then don't use bittorrent, as it is not designed for that.

 

[arkay]

If you're looking at just 'recording' via BitTorrent you can essentially do this by using torrent sites that support RSS feeds, and with the correct filtering, automatically downloading torrents into a folder that MP can access.

Yes except I think the idea of it being integrated into the guide just like you actually can tune into a particular given station adds more appeal. There might be a lot more shows on that I'd like to see which I could discover through the guide rather than checking out the torrent sites to find new series and having to go off and find out if it's a show I'd actually be interested in or not.

The whole point for me of being able to record at will whether I'm there or not and view (and skip ads) at a time of my choosing is exactly what appeals to me about HTPC's. In that respect I'm not concerned if it takes a day to get the torrent in question but I admit that if you don't know exactly what it is that you're downloading you can waste a considerable amount of bandwidth on rubbish.

If everyone followed the principle of adding preview clips into their torrents you could essentially get what you want re the left to right downloads. Unfortunately I think it would require a specialised app that assembled video torrents in the same uniform fashion and then everyone would need to be using it for it to work.

It wouldn't be an easy standard to implement.

Cheers,

Arkay.

 

[BillyGates]

I really don't agree with downloading bittorrent files left to right as this essentially breaks the algorithm to evenly distribute pieces to maximise bandwidth and provide redundancy for everyone on the tracker...

I was waiting for this arguement to come up... reality is:

1. A customized MediaPortal/Torrent plugin would be a very small percentage of the clients most people would use anyway, so in fact wouldn't impact the 'life of a torrent'.

2. For popular torrents there's 100's+ seeds so again I don't see the problem. If one was concerned about torrents 'dieing' because of this client, one could implement some logic like, 'there must be 'x' (x=10?) number of seeds before this can be used'

Is 15-30 minutes really too long to wait for a file to download? If you want the file left to right...

15-30mins is long to wait when it's 10:30pm and you want to see something now... 1 minute would be preferrable.

... then don't use bittorrent

Why not? Hundreds of seeds? High upload rates? What's the problem? Do you have any other alternatives?

Thanks for the input.

 

[jawbroken]

You can argue that only a few people will use it all you like, it just means that you are acknowledging that it has a negative impact but try to hide that behind all the other people who are using bittorrent as intended and not working around the system. It is similar to the reasons that a lot of private trackers ban BitComet, it doesn't really explicitly cheat, but it does lie to peers, breaks superseeding mode for the entire swarm (as your left to right mode will also impact), requests peer lists from the tracker much more often than the tracker specifies, etc.

I don't think there is anyway a tracker would know that you were downloading right to left, so you couldn't be caught out or anything. So I guess it comes down to more of an ethical or moral argument. Personally, since bittorrent provides such an excellent distributed peer network to me, I am happy to wait the extra couple of minutes and abide by the bittorrent specifications. Other people may consider those extra minutes too high a price to pay for being fair.