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People have tried to build BitTorrent clients to do this. As far as I know they never took off. The primary problem is you oftentimes don't get people who want to share back or who have firewalls or other connections that don't allow them to share back. So you end up with a few people who end up seeding everything out. The second problem is in order to watch a streaming protocol things need to arrive in order. It is totally possible to do with BitTorrent and request the blocks in the order that you want but you may not always be able to get them in the order you want.

In general people aren't tolerant of lag and spinning circles and other such things when they're trying to watch streaming content. If you're fine with just watching it a little bit later might as well queue it up and left the whole thing down load so it's ready when you're ready.

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jeroenhd 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Popcorn Time did this and it worked great. Starting a torrent wasn't instant, but once a buffer was built up, it streamed just fine.

Popcorn Time got taken down pretty hard because they became too popular too fast.

A commercial solution could have a seed server optimized for streaming the initial segments of video files to kickstart the stream, and let basic torrents deal with the rest of the stream.

	▲	SXX 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Popcorn Time still works and used by everyone who cares. It's just not as hyped anymore.

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bayesianbot 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The biggest issue I've seen with these is the networking limitations in a browser - there might be hundreds of seeders for a video and using a normal streaming torrent video player works well, but as torrent clients in the browser need to use WebRTC / WebTorrent, there might be just 0-5 seeders supporting it. I don't see much adoption for WebTorrents before the widely used standard Bittorrent clients support the protocol.

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memet_rush 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too? Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.

The main reason I would think it would be useful is 1. since streaming sites seem to lose a lot of money and 2. sports streams are really bad, even paid ones. I have dazn and two other sports streaming services and they still lag and are only 720p

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bawolff 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too?

I think you would probably need something more in the neighbourhood of 10 minutes to really make a difference. If you could make a stable p2p live streaming app with the number of peers all watching the same stream in the hundreds and only 30 seconds latency, i'd consider that pretty amazing.

> Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.

If we are talking about a livestream (and not "netflix" type streaming) then i don't think seeders are a thing. You can't seed a file that isn't finished being created yet.

If you mean more generally punishing free-riders, i think that is difficult in a live stream as generally data would be coming in from a different set of peers than the peers you are sending data out to, so its difficult (maybe not impossible) to know who is misbehaving.

	▲	pests 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Apparently PeerTube can do 10s delay to hundreds (not thousands) of viewers.

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dave4420 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

With sports streams you specifically want low lag, don’t you? It’s no fun being spoilered by people cheering (or not) next door.

	▲	memet_rush 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		i wouldn't mind a minute of lag tbh if the quality and reliability was better. I'm pay $20 a month for dazn and it still lags and buffers lol

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pabs3 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/

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BiteCode_dev 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

stremio works fine and is quite popular.

It's similar to popcorn time that was killed by legal ways so I'd say they did take off.

Stremio smartly avoids being killed by making pirating an optional plugin you have to install from another site so they get deniability.

It works well and save my ass from needing 1000s' of subscriptions.

	▲	SchwKatze 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was going to cite stremio too, it's far from perfect but it works fine most of the time.