[Theora] Streaming Theora

[Ralph Giles]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 01:18:44AM -0400, Paul Messina wrote:

> Perhaps this is a stupid question, but would it be possible (probably alot 
> of work if possible) to have a bandwith sharing video stream using 
> something similar to bittorrent?  Basically, bittorrent but playing the 
> video as it's downloading.   Is this possible/feasible or is it just 
> wishful thinking?

In theory, but I don't think anyone's done the experiment. Bram
has said that clients have control over which blocks they request,
so it's possible to request within a sliding window. However, to
achieve reasonable performance the window has to be fairly large,
and it can already take several minutes to get a large torrent
flowing, so it's not clear, I think, how useful it would be in
practice. That is, it might well be able to keep up with playback
for long videos, but you might still have to wait 2-5 minutes 
for it to 'buffer' before you can start watching anything. 

Because of this, and of course the small bandwidth available to
lots of people most current work has focussed on "podcast" style
distribution.

I'd like to see the results of such an experiment though, so please
try if you're motivated.

I should also mention, Arc Riley was working on a design for Ogg-based
stream sharing. See http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare for details.
Of course there's no code, and it's not nearly as mature a design as
bittorrent.

 -r

> Paul Messina
> 
> 
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