Wikimedia Trying P2P Video Distribution 85
bigmammoth writes "One potential problem with campaigns and programs to increase video on Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images. The P2P-Next consortium has created an HTML5 streaming BitTorrent browser add-on to try and help experiment with ways to reduce the costs of video distribution. As described in a Wikimedia tech blog post, once the SwarmPlayer add-on is installed, and when using the multimedia beta, video on the site will be streamed via the hybrid HTTP / BitTorrent SwarmPlayer. For smooth playback the Swarmplayer downloads high priority pieces over HTTP while getting low priority bits from the BitTorrent swarm. The same technology is available for experimentation with any site via the standalone version of the Kaltura HTML5 Media library."
Re:Great (Score:2, Informative)
a) Wikimedia is (allegedly [wikipedia.org]) encyclopaedic media, whilst youtube is cats. Not direct competition.
b) My outbound connection is extremely limited.
c) The people who need to be convinced fight against "websites" and "torrents", but they would have a real "Oh my God - it's full of data!" moment if they understood what they were talking about. It's all just bits. Encrypted bits even more so.
With Chrome... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great (Score:3, Informative)
people see Colour in data
I don't even see the colours anymore. All I see SYN, SYN, ACK, ACK, FIN, ACK
Re:Network neutrality (Score:3, Informative)
--Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt
Re:Not Great Enough (Score:3, Informative)
IPv6 includes multicast IIRC.
IPv4 multicast is basically broken by NAT, so is unlikely to ever get used on the internet itself.
Re:Not Great Enough (Score:3, Informative)
the routers will have to store huge in-memory databases to keep track of the downstream routers who need each packet stream
Congratulations. You've just explained why multicast was never deployed over the public IPv4 Internet even before NAT had become widespread.