At this moment, it is 10 minutes after my first publish of the Bittorrent enclosure in the main feed. I have at this moment 30 peers connected to me and I hope to each other. I’ve pushed about a share ratio of 2, but I don’t know how efficiently the short-lived iPodder clients will be about maximizing the piece distribution. I’d assume at this point that even if I disconnected right now, there would be enough pieces to make a full copy out there. If I did that, I wonder exactly what would happen? The connected clients would swap chunks amongst themselves and as each one completed it would drop off, leaving it a slow footrace to be the last one without a full copy. However it works out, as long as this is all working, I’m delighted. This is pretty much what I expected to happen – a big burst of simultaneously downloading peers happening right after a publish but I’ll admit that this is more clients in a shorter time period than I was expecting.
The Experiment Begins
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It’s not easy for us in Europe, I think. I start downloading shows in the morning, when most of the clients in the US already downloaded the file and dropped of.
iPodderX is downloading your show for about 1.5 hours now and is still stucked at 8 MB. I just did a direct download of the MP3 on a different server and started seeding the file from there. Now everything starts running, and apparently not only for me but for others, too. The server uploads stuff at about 5MBit/s right now.
It must have worked for me because I’ve got the test MP3 you posted. I can’t find the option where iPodder lets me keep the torrent app open for longer – sort of defeats the object if I can’t share more 🙁
Christian, Let’s sync up our download times so you have at least one more local peer because it seems to have worked okay from here. Try setting yours to start half an hour or so after 4AM GMT (5AM CET).
I have to agree with Christian – I’m in the UK and it’s taking HOURS to download the bittorrent – I’m not always on the computer that long – and it does get switched off – hardly worth having broadband at this rate. 🙂 – It wouldn’t be so bad if the iPodder program could pick up partial bittorrents and carry on the next time the computer is on – but it still doesn’t work out if I want to download the latest EGC to listen to on the way to work. 🙁
BAck to the MP3s direct for me.
We all should encourage people to use bt clients instead (as they also take care of the sharing part) and make the bt client developers fire up the playlist thing.
As for media player 10: Here we have ‘scan on start for new mp3 for my playlist’ but I think itunes does not have so.
If we need more seeds then let’s see if I can seed the same file from here (work) to make a bit of a difference.
Paul you need to leave your machine on for it to be useful. Paulofcthulu – fantastic name 🙂
It sounds to me for the bittorrent to work it has to have some fairly permanent seeds in place. As someone above mentioned, the bittorrent aware iPodders only leave the bittorrent itself open only as long as it necessary to retrieve the bittorrent. It seems to me that unless folks are grabbing the torrents via a dedicated BT client then the whole thing gets bogged down and does not work anywhere near its potential. Does anyone know how the iPodders are doing the bittorrent? It would be nice if they included options for, one, limiting the upload speed so that all your bandwidth doesn’t get soaked up while gettting the torrent (the way the original BT client does), and two, the ability to leave the torrent open until a certain share ratio was reached (preferably 1:1).
I personally grab all the torrents in Azureus and keep em up, even though I get the mp3 as a direct download from iPodderX, just to help the cause (they are almost all flagged as ‘Top Priority’ seeds in Azureus, meaning, I think, folks are really requesting them). But that is kinda like cheating though, isn’t it. I mean the idea is to have the podcatching software do this and not have to kinda artificially seed things and keep them up with non-podcatching software. I believe there is a plugin for Azureus that allows it to read rss feeds and get the bittorrents started; what we need is something to get it that last step and into iTunes. I’ll have to play around with something, I could see it as being something as simple as a watched folder that when files with a certain name would get moved into iTunes.
I’m all for the bittorrent thing and think it one of the better ideas for helping the podcasters out with their bandwidth loads. I’m glad that Dave is taking the lead on this and if we can make it work for him perhaps other podcasters will use this method as well; but I think we also need to get the podcasting software on board and supporting bittorrents in a way that really makes it work without the need for assistance from dedicated BT clients.
Thanks RJ, just search on that name on google to see what I get up to. 🙂
Unfortuantely it’s the nature of the house that the computers are switched on & off daily. We also podcast over at http://www.rpgmp3.com and it’s proving useful, but haven’t tried bittorrents yet – even though we’ve blown through our not inconsiderable bandwidth allocation twice this month already.
Does anyone have any stats on just how much gigabytage podcasters are getting through daily/weekly?