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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Take Bittorrent, the ultra-efficient method for transferring large files (i.e. media) and combine it with RSS, the preferred standard for subscription-based blog feeds, and you get an interesting new broadcast medium. So you awake each morning, saddle up at your computer, and find fresh bootleg MP3s, videos, and rights-free television episodes. Some very smart people are working to make this a reality. Check it, yo.

Posted by morland @ 11:24 PM

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you know...i used bittorrent once to get a gbv concert, and it took a REALLY long time. i get the whole community aspect of it, but, damn man, i'm talking like several hours here. maybe i'm just spoiled by the download speeds of the hotline server i've been using for coming on 5 years now, but it didn't seem worth it. i dig the whole "lossless" compression and all, but i'm not so much of an audiophile that i can tell the diff.

cool that lhb got a nod in the piece though. that's where i got the live gbv link from to begin with.

Posted by: josh on March 11, 2004 12:43 AM

So there are actually several reasons why downloads can be slow. Bittorrent depends on having many people hosting the same file(s) to improve speed, so the more popular the file (and the bittorrent community at the moment is still an emerging one, but it tends as a whole to have good taste) the faster your download speed.

Other reasons:
http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/#speed

It's kind of zany. I've had downloads that started off painfully slow, then became blazingly fast, only to slow down towards the end (the reason for the slowness at the beginning is due to high-latency trackers, at the end due to the very last reason on this page: http://torrentbits.org/faq.php). I've also had downloads, like the Jay-Z Construction Set (http://jayzconstructionset.com/) which at 649MB took under 2 hours (~100KBps).

Posted by: morland on March 11, 2004 09:55 AM

bit torrent is a great tool. furthernet is also the same kind of program.

there are great live shows out there. I still prefer regular old FTP sites (like etree) the best, however. they seem to be the fastest, and most reliable, too.

and hotline used to be great, but furthurnet

Posted by: The guy who lives in vail on March 12, 2004 08:41 PM

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