Pete, I'm not completely up on the entire BitTorrent specification, but I think the way it is designed is INTENDED to take no more bandwidth from one person (including the initial seeder) to download than a direct video download. My reading of the spec (one time) indicated that I think there could be an overhead of 20-30% on small files with poorly designed BitTorrent client, but I think this may not affect the large video files.
There is the overhead of serving the BitTorrent meta file (which could be 5Kbytes - 100kbytes depending on your chosen chunk size and the size of the file. And there is the overhead of the protocol. But the savings you get is from the other clients being able to serve each other. So if you have 10 people downloading a 100MByte video at the same time, you will have to serve your video once to seed other downloaders. There are other protocols and even ways to optimize the download with smart BitTorrent clients and servers (serving a different 10% of the file to each client so that 100% of the file is available outside your server) but I don't think these are guaranteed within the protocol. My complete and total guess is that you could reduce your bandwith requirements by 40%-80% (compared to direct video downloads). Even more if you have a lot of simultaneous downloads. Maybe someone with real experience can chime in here. I may have this wrong, as this is from the top of my head, but based on a little knowledge. Greg Smith Author, FeederReader - Pocket PC *direct* RSS text, audio, video, podcasts www.FeederReader.com - Download on the Road --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Pete Prodoehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jay dedman wrote: > > Im always curious about when torrents will get popular. > > this way no one has to worry about bandwidth. > > its always this "full of potential" idea. > > > > gary at torrentacracy has come up with this: > > http://www.torrentocracy.com/blog/archives/2005/09/pep_is_deliciou_1. shtml > > it bascially scrapes any feed and puts the items into torrents. > > he becomes the first seeder. > > > > in my mind, we will all have a home computer that becomes a server. > > we keep it on and connected at all times. > > youll have 100GB of your favorate video seeded on it. > > this is how we create a truly decentaralized video network. > > Well, even with torrents, you still have to worry about bandwidth. And > my main home computer is used for work, so I really can't afford to slow > it down serving our torrents. I do have another server at home that > could, but it doesn't have the disk space, and I'd worry about it > bogging down the network. > > I'm not against torrents, I'm very much in favor of them, but even I > (who I consider to be pretty technically astute) am a bit skeptical > about implementing torrents and the ramifications of doing so. Maybe I > just need to do more reading... > > Is anyone in the videoblogging community experimenting with torrents today? > > Pete > > -- > http://tinkernet.org/ > videoblog for the future... ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/T8sf5C/tzNLAA/TtwFAA/lBLqlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
