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Topic: P2P Ogg Streaming (Read 3638 times) previous topic - next topic
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P2P Ogg Streaming

I've been working on a P2P system for both files and continuous streams for media in an Ogg container.

Why another P2P implementation?

Alot of people have suggested that Peercast works for continuous streams, and Bittorrent works for files, so why build another system?

Peercast has alot of problems which inhibit it's adoption.  You could point out the security issues, whereas listeners who help distribute the stream (posing as legit Peercast users) could redistributed alternative or modified content.  For instance, they could insert commercials, political advertisements, or completely different content (ie, music of their favorite band).  There's no seamless approach to secure against this with the current Peercast system.

Another problem with Peercast is it's licensing.  While they release their code under the GPL, they add an additional clause preventing non-verbatim servlets (ie, a 3rd party XMMS/Winamp plugin for Peercast) from connecting to their network (sic).  Not only does this cause complicated political concerns including the ownership of the P2P network created with their software, it also prevents 3rd parties (such as Nullsoft) to add support for their protocol while solving no security issues.  Someone intentionally distributing an altered or alternative Peercast stream is unlikely to care about the license.

Lastly, Peercast is only useful for continuous streams.  The current software does not support P2P streaming of static files, such as show archives or a band's music.

As for Bittorrent, which is admittedly a good system distributing large files, it does not support continuous streams.  Even for static Ogg files it doesn't easily support playing them as they download.

Other free P2P systems have been started which support Ogg as well, but none of these support both streaming files and continuous streams.

I believe that in order for a P2P system to be adopted widely enough to be useful it must seamlessly support both, it must be integrated with media players, it must be freely adoptable by 3rd parties, and it must be clearly superior to existing solutions.  IceShare meets all of these requirements.

I'm writting here looking for help with continued development.  If you have an interest in developing a P2P streaming solution for Ogg please check out the collection of IceShare related wiki pages at http://wiki.xiph.org/IceShare

P2P Ogg Streaming

Reply #1 –
Is there any code to look at / play around with?
"To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world." Or maybe your words.

P2P Ogg Streaming

Reply #2 –
I just dropped a link to the current development IceTracker (written in Python): http://www.xiph.org/~arc/server.py

Note that this is incomplete, but is fairly polished as far as what it does support.  This is the same code that's currently accessable on port 8200 of xiph.org (use telnet).

A few more rough edges need to be ironed out as far as the IceT protocol is concerned, which is documented at http://wiki.xiph.org/IceT (use this doc to talk to the IceTracker).