The VideoLAN Forums

hi,

i was curios about the idea what could be if i could sort of "play" torrents, if they are well shared. i mean, the downstream one can get with certain files is good enough to stream it after a few minutes of buffering.
i remember that i could do that (view unfinished downloads) within Kazaa, that, different to bittorrent, downloaded progressiv. maybe there could be something like a plugin with a modifed bt client, that downloads a file onwardly to stream it to vlc, as soon as there is enough in the buffer.

could this be a new feature, or is this something that generally would not be a part of this media player (since its a player, not a p2p client)?
i am not only thinking about watching simpsons, but this could be a nice way to provide hi-res podcast-like tv to a large audience.

hope to get some feedback&ideas..

/julius.

Try Democracy Player from http://www.getdemocracy.com/. It is a Video Podcast client with BitTorrent support. The Linux and Windows versions are built on top of VLC.

thanks for the link, but thats not what i was asking for. it's more an rss frontend than a media player, and, you cannot see something unless it is completed.
so, if anyone got something where i can watch while downloading, it would be great to hear frome that.

/julius.

when you say that bittorrent is not progressive, that means we couldn't get the beginning of the data to start decoding it, no ?

i am not an expert to bittorrent, but as far as i know it is up/downloading little chunks of the whole file. to have 90% of a file does not mean that you can watch the first 90% of your content, wich is opposite to the behavior of kazaa, where only the last 10% were missing. in addition to that, and which is even worse, the file can be mixed up, as if the chunks were not in correct order.
i looked at this democracy client, it's a start to what i suggested, but since there is no way to see the file during downloading it, it is not better than any other podcast/rss based tv player i used before. there is no difference in handling http and bt downloads, which makes no sense for me, too. at least http downloads should work for a stream.

/julius.

Right, this would not work. BitTorrent operates so efficiently by being able to pick and choose what sections of the data it nabs. If you have a BT client such as uTorrent, which can show you a grphical display of what parts of the file you have, nad what parts are more available, you will see that you do not recieve the file "in order."

i searched around the web a bit, there are a lot of (unfinished) projects dealing with sending streams over p2p networks. i really don't know why there is no player to handle bittorrent files.
i'm not so much into programming, but i'm convinced this could work really fine for a lot of people. it's only a matter of time, until the large torrent sites use RSS to let people access threre index. this would make a great combination.

Bittorrent support would be pretty tricky.

Bittorrent files download parts of the file from seemingly random places in the file, and not from the start. Assuming you want to start playing from the beginning, that's a problem.

Also, these pieces do not match the breaks in video frames, so theres no guarentee that even the single bittorrent pieces can be decoded.

If you downloaded, say 80% or 90% of the video, it could probably be played ok-ish. But then why not wait for 100%?

VideoLAN is for media, not file transfer. I think this is an innapropriate feature.

for streaming media i think this is a good idea