<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br style="font-size: 18px;" class=""><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Oct 12, 2021, at 06:45 , Mark Tinka <<a href="mailto:mark@tinka.africa" class="">mark@tinka.africa</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/11/21 22:57, Matthew Walster
wrote:<br class="">
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Ignoring for
the moment that P2P is inherently difficult to stream with
(you're usually downloading chunks in parallel, and with
devices like Smart TVs etc you don't really have the storage
to do so anyway) there's also the problem that things like
BitTorrent don't know network topology and therefore only
really increases the cross-sectional bandwidth required.</div>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Not to
mention that it has been tried before, and didn't work then
either.</div>
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Yeah, and people also want to click a title and start watching
immediately.<br class="">
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Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I know BitTorrent
to work is the file is downloaded to disk, unarchived and then
listed as ready to watch. It also assumes the device has all the
necessary apps and codecs needed to render the file.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div>It can work this way and usually does if the format of the file being transmitted is an archive (e.g. rar, tar) or compressed file (e.g. gzip) or both (e.g. zip).</div><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div><div style="font-size: 18px;">OTOH, since MPEG is already a compressed format and little is gained by further attempting to compress it (usually the opposite), it can be sent as a stream. BitTorrent can handle streams and there are clients that will start playback as soon as a sufficient fraction of the early portion of the stream has arrived while continuing to download the remainder of the</div><div style="font-size: 18px;">file in the background.</div><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div><div style="font-size: 18px;">Also, BitTorrent isn’t the only form of chunked stream transfer available these days, it’s just the straw man most people use to talk about multiple-source chunked transfer of a common file.</div><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div><div style="font-size: 18px;"><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class="">
On the other hand, BitTorrent could just make an Apple
TV/PS4/PS5/Xbox/whatever-device-you-use app as well. But I doubt
that will work, unless someone can think up a clever way to modify
BitTorrent to suit today's network architectures.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div>BitTorrent and a number of other peer-to-peer chunked transfers are already well suited to today’s network architectures and work just fine. The problem is that there’s a bit of history of eyeball ISPs becoming hostile and using things like DPI to find ways to interfere with them when they become “too successful”.</div><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div><div style="font-size: 18px;">Owen</div><div style="font-size: 18px;"><br class=""></div></body></html>