SwarmPlayer BitTorrent Streaming Player (and plugins for it)?
#1
Lightbulb 
EZTV (and probably sme other sites) as well as some legal sites are starting to add a new type of torrent file that allows you to stream their releases using the BitTorrent protocol so instead of having to wait for your torrents to finish downloading, you can stream them and watch them right away as you are downloading them instead of having to wait.

Now if that's not something that's got a lot of potential for XBMC users, I don't know what is!

Unfortunately I'm totally lacking in any of the necessary skills to do something about it, but I'm hoping that someone on here might also think it's a worthwhile project and take up the mantle and give it a shot. What do you guys think?

I doubt I'd be allowed to link to EZTV here, so I'm not going to but I'm sure everyone know's where to find it, or know's how to use a search engine. Wink

SwarmPLayer (and info about it) can be found here:
http://trial.p2p-next.org/
http://www.tribler.org/wiki/SwarmPlayer
http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/LiveStreamingBeta
http://www.myp2p.eu/softwareitem.php?sof...t=software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribler#SwarmPlayer
Quote:SwarmPlayer is a Python (programming language) based BitTorrent Internet TV viewer. It allows you to watch BitTorrent-hosted peer-to-peer digital media distribution of video on demand and plays live Tribler streaming media. It is based on the same core as the Tribler TV application.

The core software is free and open source software based on the Tribler platform, licensed under the LGPL 2.1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P-Next
Quote:The European Union's P2P-Next project to develop an internet television distribution standard will build on Tribler technology under development at the Delft University of Technology
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#2
I would think you would have to write an app, and that swarm player is still in beta.
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#3
ah well, I live in hope. Smile
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#4
this would be amazing

With this streaming you could if you want have all the cover art set on the wall in xbmc then stream your torrents and make it so after you watched them you can delete from hard disc that's if you don't have enough room to keep them. Doing this all within xbmc would be awesome. Even if you chose to delete them then if xbmc could keep the cover art so every time you choose to stream the cover art is there for every title then this would be totally awesome and I am sure it's possible to do. Will you be adding this anytime soon?
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#5
i would support this 100%
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#6
More than a year since Tribler was last suggested? I am primarily a Boxee user, but I suppose XBMC is the real open source community responsible for Boxee. I posted this just a few minutes ago on Boxee's get satisfaction website, but now I think this may be a better place for it.

Title of Feature Request :

Peer to peer streaming of on-demand or live content using Swarmplayer (an lgpl Firefox plugin)

Body :

Swarmplayer peer to peer streaming - Peer to peer streaming means never having to wait for a download to finish, ever again. Watch that one episode of *public domain show name* as quickly as you can type in the episode name.

Swarmplayer uses a modified application of the bittorrent protocol to enable streaming of both live and non-live (video on demand) content. They have recently released a version that is a firefox plugin for windows, and promise a linux version soon, making it completely cross platform. The software is lgpl, so distribution shouldn't be a problem. Their stand alone player has seen good linux support in the past, so a linux firefox plugin is not unreasonable to expect soon. I think since boxee integrates firefox into its media backend, and since tribler is now a firefox plugin, it should be reasonably straight forward to support tribler content in boxee.

XBMC, I honestly don't know if you have the same integration with Mozilla, but Swarmplayer is also written in python.

It would mean having an infinite media library without having to have much storage. 10 gig or less could hold pieces of every movie you've ever watched on the machine, and that data would be sufficient to keep your upload maxed out at the limits you've set. Since a boxee box may very likely be on 24x7 feeding the network, that would make for a very strong network.

Peer to peer *live* streaming will put the ability to broadcast video to millions of people into the hands of everybody who has a $30/month internet connection. This could mean a high school football game, a community theater production, or a local bar broadcasting it's live music to 100,000 simultaneous viewers without having to pay for unusual bandwidth costs.

It is even conceivable that a machine with no significant storage at all could maintain a ratio > 1.0 by downloading a piece or two from a statistically desirable file, caching it in memory, then uploading it repeatedly. This would make even hard drive-less machines like the boxee box eligible to participate and valuable to the network. Just plug it into power, wifi associates, login/register, and you'll be watching something within 5 minutes of powering it up for the first time.

Peer to peer video will happen as soon as the bandwidth available is sufficient and the community is large enough to hold the content. Bandwidth is going up no matter what, so all we really need is a community of users to make it work.
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#7
The big problem I see is who would want to listen to a local bars music lineup and how is the bar going to measure the number of people listening with the entertainment industry going more and more on the offensive against any type of sharing of what they consider to be their property which that they license to you and only you. It is unlikely that any local bar could afford having 100k people listening to their music selection (not a very local bar with that kind of audience) at least not without making these people pay good money for it. Thus they would not use this type of media for it.

The most likely usage would be for the sharing of commercial movies, tv shows and music which besides illegal is also quite stupid as in most countries even the assisting in large scale copyright infringement is punishable and could result in anything from a warning to loosing your internet connection for a year, a sizable fine or even a possible jail sentence.
As for the once that enable others to infringe copyrights (look at the pirate bay for a good example) they are likely to be persecuted as well so even if someone would deliver a patch for XBMC that would enable this it is unlikely to ever make the stable branch or even be accepted by the XBMC developers. A python plugin is of course an option but again I seriously doubt that such a development effort can count on a lot of support from the XBMC development team, as well as there being a high likelihood of someone from the entertainment industry getting quite unhappy with it and attempting to persecute the developers of such a plugin. Certainly if Boxee ends up being popular there is a high likelihood that a plugin like that gets noticed quite fast by the various legal teams on the pay role at you favorite entertainment company.
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#8
All of your arguments are based on the potential for copyright infringement.

So your big problem is :

Q1) Who would want to watch content created independently?
A) See youtube.

Q2) Copyright infringement is bad
A) I agree, lets not do that, just like with Bittorrent, VCRs, and copy machines.
Any technology that makes content distribution easier is going to have the potential to be abused for copyright infringement. Your argument would be equally valid against the invention of the internet.

No offense, but just because you can't see the potential legal applications, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
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#9
I never said they do not exist. All I was saying is that they are small at best, and there is a huge risk of abuse leading me to conclude that it is not the best of things to add to XBMC.

Of course I understand your disagreement you see a wide range of applications but comparing the ease of use of YouTube and it's central distribution setup with a bittorrent based p2p distribution model is quite unfair not only is the later a lot less search friendly it is also a lot less reliable in terms of speed of delivery and the ability to comment and rate various offers on the network. All in all it is like comparing walking into a wine cellar with a blindfold on and picking a nice bottle of wine, which might be empty you cannot see after all, based on the name of the product alone. To having a good wine guide and the possibility to consult a host of people about their favorite before choosing a bottle that is guaranteed to be unopened.

Even so if you like a gamble and are willing to risk having to sit and wait for a long time to find out that your freak of a neighbor posted him self in a tutu dancing to Michal Jacksons Thriller again, by all means go right ahead. But I still cannot really see that kind of content distribution as the way of the future not for XBMC nor for the rest of the world.
Would love to be proven wrong though my neighbor is a quite attractive female and the thought of seeing here in just a tutu is not all that bad. Her boyfriend though... ah well I might just be willing to gamble as long as I get to stop the playback as soon as I see his beer belly entering the picture No
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#10
Why is it that people seem to think that when someone proposes an idea, the appropriate thing to do is to try to shoot it down rather than try to improve upon it?

Now your argument is that peer to peer video streaming is "a lot less search friendly it is also a lot less reliable in terms of speed of delivery and the ability to comment and rate various offers on the network."

Rcoops, I'm sorry, but this is not a shortcoming of peer to peer streaming at all!

Search friendly? Commenting? What prevents a search engine from indexing these videos and allowing comments on this content? The streams would be distributed in exactly the same was as other torrents are distributed today.

Think about a popular torrent search engine. Ignore any potential copyright infringement you may see on that site, because that's beside the point here. Does the site you are thinking of have trouble with searching or commenting?

As far as "less reliable in terms of speed of delivery", this is also not necessarily true. A content provider could supplement the bandwidth of the stream just as easily as they could provide 100% of the bandwidth themselves. Imagine FOX decided they wanted to stream something. They could put up their stream, and then put 10 megabits or more of bandwidth of their own to guarantee a satisfactory customer experience.

.. and how easy is it to set this up? I'll tell you!

I installed swarmplayer on my ubuntu machine at home. It's just a .deb package and installs painlessly. I already had VLC and apache installed. I wrote a two line script that starts VLC in streaming mode, and then starts swarmplayer, listening to and broadcasting the output from vlc as one of it's streams.

This creates a torrent file in my /var/www directory automatically. I also created a simple index.html file that has a link to that torrent file. When I download that torrent and open it with swarmplayer, swarmplayer will tune in and then create a local stream at http://127.0.0.1:6897, which I can then point a regular media player at, such as VLC, Totem, or XBMC (if I knew how to point XBMC at a http streaming video).

In fact, in about 8 hours I will post a link here for my web server. You will be able to test a stream coming from my own machine. The only delay is that I have to get home from work before I can hit 'stream'.
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#11
Also, sorry if my reply makes me sound like an asshole. I didn't mean it to.
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#12
Okay, I"ve created a swarmplayer stream. As long as my computer doesn't shut down from overheating (it's been happening lately), and as long as my ip stays the same, it should be working. I'm eager to hear the experiences of anyone who tries, since this is my first attempt to stream to others in this way.

just go to http://68.203.6.181/

There is a firefox plugin linked at the bottom of the page, as well as a link to the stand alone torrent file. The movie I'm playing is the cabinet of dr. caligari , from 1920. It's supposedly a very messed up film, and I believe it is in public domain.
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#13
The license for that film is: Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs so you are right that is ok to stream.

I'll have a go at it in a few hours when I get home. Company frowns upon streaming media so much so that they block it all and fire you for trying even trying to get around that block. Sad

I have nothing against the idea of streaming media via the bittorrent protocol but I still don't think it will or should land in the XBMC code base. Of course the playback of streaming content should for sure be in XBMC as that is a very valuable thing and as far as I know that is already possible via various means among which several plugins etc.

The downloading of media files be it normal or streaming bittorrent, usenet, edonkey, http or any other form should not be in the XBMC code base for the simple reason that there are many other applications specialized in that area that are under constant development and are continually being improved. In the XBMC code base they would just tie up more developer resources without even offering a reasonable chance of offering any real benefit over the already existing software out there.
With the list of new features related to a media center and the number of minor and larger improvements on the XBMC developer wishlist on top of possible bugs that are found every now and then I seriously doubt the wisdom of adding more and more only sideways related code to XBMC.

As you said your self it is easy to setup a stream on your local computer so that part is covered. Plugins can play streaming media so that part is/can be covered. The only thing missing is a way to pick what source one wants to "tune in to" from inside XBMC. With a bit of scripting that should be a piece of cake to create inside XBMC.

In short all you need is to do create a plugin, this means the XBMC code can remain free of unneeded code that imitates already available applications which are quite good at what they do.
Just to prevent the argument of but XBMC is quite similar to existing applications so why not leave the whole thing and just use those? XBMC was build for the xbox where there was no such thing. Only later on was it ported to other platforms where is quickly proved to be better then anything else on the market thus it makes no sense to stop when you are at the top. Though as stated before there is a good reason not to take on more then you can handle by branching out into a million different things that are only sideways related to your core strengths.
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#14
ImAFriendlyGuy Wrote:Okay, I"ve created a swarmplayer stream.
just go to http://68.203.6.181/

Impressive progress. What is the policy of XBMC on P2P technology and inclusion of code on mainbranch? Searches reveal a few discussion on this, but no agreed policy.

Sorry to sounds like a newbie, I'm not doing much coding anymore. At Delft University of Technology I'm coordinating the P2P group and also responsible for the roadmap of P2P-Next. Roughly 55 scientist/developers in total.

We would like to cooperate with XBMC if possible. We are working with European public broadcasters on P2P and are moving "video-on-demand" into the cloud.
- Johan
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#15
hi there,

just so it's clear, i haven't really the authority to speak for the team on this (no int policy has been set yet). but imo p2p is ay-oh-kay - it's just another protocol/vfs entry. i think we'd welcome pretty much anything that brings more content to our users and is legal (and honors our license obviously).
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