This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Friday, September 10, 2004

TorrentAid: Cross-Network Swarmable Trackerless Torrents

Wow, this looks like an interesting tool; I need to learn more about it:

"TorrentAid is a suite of easy, powerful, open-source BitTorrent tools. These tools not only work with traditional centralised torrents, but can also create a new generation of decentralised, cross-network swarmable trackerless torrents. With supporting download software these backward-compatible torrents can be used without having to contact a centralised tracker, and can also be "cross-network swarm downloaded" combining BitTorrent download sources with sources on other P2P networks such as Gnutella2 and eDonkey2000."

'Dream centre' of the brain found

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Dream centre' of the brain found: "Scientists believe they have located the part of the brain where people's dreams are created."

Likely First Photo of Planet Beyond the Solar System

There is an interesting story about a possible first visual sighting of a planet around another star.

200 Volunteers Needed for Space Launch

The Ansari X Prize needs volunteers to help at the Scaled Composites and da Vinci Project's launch attempts in the next few months! I've digitized and created BitTorrent's of an Ansari X Prize video that is pretty cool and can tell you more about what we are doing. Want to be a volunteer? Sign up here. I've also set up a carpool and rideshare list for those who can offer or want a ride down to Mojava, CA to see history made.

The Ansari X Prize video is about five minutes long and is available in a variety of digital video formats. Since my webserver is pretty measly I've had to turn all of the videos into torrents using BitTorrent. If you don't know what torrents are just know that it makes it much cheaper for me to offer these videos. If you want more technical info check out Wikipedia's BitTorrent entry.

First, you need to install the BitTorrent client. This is easy; just click here if you are on Windows, here if you are on Mac OS X, and here if you are on Linux. If you are having problems check out the docs.

Next, chose which torrent file to download based on what digital video player you have and how much bandwidth you have:

Quicktime:

Real Video:

Microsoft Video:

Feel free to mirror these files, and keep your BitTorrent client open to help seed the network!

Enjoy.

PS: When are we going to integrate a BitTorrent client into Mozilla/FireFox? That would make all of this much easier.

Some technical info on how this is set up:

I am running a closed BitTorrent tracker (EasyTracker) and a webserver on my Linux box. I used MakeTorrent to generate the torrents, and the headless, original Python BitTorrent client to seed the network from my webserver. BitTorrent is really starting to come together, but the tools need to integrate some more, especially for Linux (on Windows there seem to be alot of integrated tools but not quite for Linux yet). If you have any suggestions on how to make this all more seamless feel free to drop me a line.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Subscribe to Posts [Atom]