This is some really interesting stuff, a group of grad students from the University of Texas is attempting to create the first streaming video feed using P2P technology. The group is based on Swarmcast P2P server from Onion Networks, technology similar to BitTorrent but with more features.
Tom’s Hardware Guide has a really good article on the subject, you can be assured we will keep an eye on this project.
“ACTLab’s server software, called the Alluvium core, will be built on the Swarmcast platform. Clients in the ACTLab network will use a video console developed by Wiley called Alluvium Media Player, which utilizes whatever codecs the Windows, Linux, or OS X 10.4 user may have installed. “Most streaming servers have this problem,” Wiley said, “[where] they’re dividing up the bandwidth between the number of simultaneous viewers. So if you have one megabit stream that you want to push out to ten viewers, you have to push out 10 megabits. “
“So that really limits your scalability. What Alluvium does is uses swarming download technology, which is most popularized by BitTorrent. It downloads files in the background using swarming download technology, and then it turns that locally…into a stream, which it then feeds to the media player. So it makes it look like you’re doing normal streaming, but you’re actually doing file downloading…Most of the downloading that’s happening between the different viewers, is swapping pieces of files between each other, instead of downloading them directly from the server.”
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