Since imitation is the highest form of compliment, we (the engineering team at 100dimensions.com) have spent the last few months developing a similar system, plus a few features we think are missing in Miro. Namely
– distributing shows not only to computers but also to TVs for a true couch potato experience
– simpler user interface (making abstraction of the underlying technology for people who care more about the contents than how it works)
– built-in peer-to-peer distribution mechanism
– end-to-end quality of service monitoring to ensure a timely delivery of the selected shows.

Since 100dimensions has just been released, any comment or suggestion will be greatly appreciated (and even acted upon!). Thank You.

Alain Zarembowitch
Engineering team leader

Ha ha, I guess great minds think alike – I was thinking the exact same thing.

You want a p2p streaming protocol?

No, I want a free software P2P streaming protocol.

Somebody has the same problem?

thank

Try RawFlow http://www.rawflow.com/

According to them it has been fixed (at least that is what bugzilla says). If it isn’t I know that it is high priority for them.

Care to cite the bug number? The bug report I found is listed as ‘assigned’. The ‘fix’ suggested for this bug is to conflict with sun-java6-plugin, that is, to state that Miro does not work if sun-java6-plugin is installed. That’s not much of a solution in my opinion. I’m personally not going to switch to another JVM plugin runtime in order to run Miro.

According to them it has been fixed (at least that is what bugzilla says). If it isn’t I know that it is high priority for them.

To be sure, I don’t see “working at a very high level gluing everything together” as a negative (maybe you don’t either). This is basically what Ubuntu does (along with other Linux distros); and really, it’s an important part of the open source ecosystem.

No, it’s not a negative. My point was that the substrate for this type of application is missing (or at least not popularized). Until that is fixed working at the high-level is going to be unrewarding.

I don’t know why everyone is trying to shoehorn Bittorrent into P2P streaming; it seems ill suited to the task, for one due to the use of TCP. Bittorrent didn’t invent swarming downloading, I don’t know why everyone treats it like the only swarming P2P protocol.

By the way, is the nasty sun-java-plugin bug going to be fixed any time soon? It’s a common installation configuration that renders Miro inoperable.

From what Bram has said, it should be possible to do sliding window bittorrent to fast-start playback at the expense of swarm efficiency, but you still need a significantly big pipe compared to the video bitrate for this to be feasible. There’s a reason youtube looks like it does. 🙂

An easier target would be to focus on the video search interface. It’s getting very slick, but it’s odd to have to wait for the content to download completely before watching it, and a place where the native flash+web interfaces are better. That would let you do the internal work you needed to surf streaming content (aka playing content as it is downloading) without having to work on the P2P protocol. IMHO.