bittorrent support for videolan player

Feature requests for VLC.
julius
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 5
Joined: 09 Oct 2006 22:41

bittorrent support for videolan player

Postby julius » 09 Oct 2006 22:55

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.

KAMiKAZOW
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 4
Joined: 04 Sep 2006 19:11

Postby KAMiKAZOW » 09 Oct 2006 23:55

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.

julius
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 5
Joined: 09 Oct 2006 22:41

Postby julius » 10 Oct 2006 15:16

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.

funman
Developer
Developer
Posts: 1159
Joined: 03 Sep 2006 04:03
VLC version: master
Operating System: All of them
Location: Lost, please help me

Postby funman » 10 Oct 2006 15:59

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

julius
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 5
Joined: 09 Oct 2006 22:41

Postby julius » 10 Oct 2006 16:30

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.

garylisk
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 5
Joined: 12 Oct 2006 07:40
Location: St. Louis, MO, USA
Contact:

Postby garylisk » 12 Oct 2006 07:57

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."

julius
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 5
Joined: 09 Oct 2006 22:41

Postby julius » 13 Oct 2006 11:21

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.

h2g2bob
Blank Cone
Blank Cone
Posts: 46
Joined: 02 Oct 2005 13:09
Location: Exeter, UK

Hello

Postby h2g2bob » 19 Oct 2006 19:38

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%?

peepingtom
New Cone
New Cone
Posts: 2
Joined: 22 Oct 2006 21:56

Postby peepingtom » 22 Oct 2006 22:02

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

DGMurdockIII
Big Cone-huna
Big Cone-huna
Posts: 534
Joined: 14 Sep 2006 16:46
VLC version: y
Operating System: windows 10 64bit Pro
Contact:

Postby DGMurdockIII » 20 Nov 2006 21:47

for streaming media i think this is a good idea


Return to “VLC media player Feature Requests”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests