Re: [xine-devel] .mov stream causing segfaults in xine.

[Shawn W. <sha...@wi...>]

On Monday 29 September 2003 04:34 pm, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> I don't know what bittorrent is, but to me, it acts much like wget.

Bittorrent is a clever way of distributing large files efficiently using a 
P2P-like mechanism.  Once a user has downloaded one or more blocks of the 
file successfully, the "tracker" will then tell other downloaders to get the 
block from him, rather than from the source server.  So as the number of 
downloaders increase, so does the selection of download sources and the 
aggregate bandwidth available for new downloaders.  Beyond a certain point, 
the original hosting site doesn't provide the stream data at all, but instead 
just coordinates the downloading of blocks between peers.

Using bittorrent, a relatively small server/connection can host a big video 
file that is being downloaded simultaneously by huge numbers of clients.  Up 
to a point (when the tracker gets saturated), having more downloaders 
actually *increases* the individual users' download rates.

Cool stuff.  You'll probably see it used more and more widely; it's already 
very common to find torrent links posted on slashdot, for example, because 
the sites that can serve a 100MB file to 200,000 users simultaneously are 
pretty rare :-)

Shawn.