Data is still coming in from the Bittorrent swap experiment. Some folks in Europe report really slooooow download times, like over an hour for the file. If your download is prohibitively slow, don’t think twice about switching back to the direct MP3 feed. Please do. Before yesterday, almost everyone used the direct MP3 downloads, now if 80% of people use the Bittorrents it is still a huge gain.
I’m curious – for those of you that had really slow downloads, are you in a networking situation that prevents you from uploading? I’m not sure how that part of the protocol works but I was under the assumption that your download gets throttled down if you aren’t uploading.
Thanks to everyone for your patience, and for playing along. I’m trying to push the envelope in this direction, and thus far it seems to be (mostly) working. Special thanks to all my seeding angels running Azureus or just leaving open a Bittorrent download to help be a seed. Thank you! You make this all work.
Dave, I can’t tell about the UK, but in Germany most of us have ADSL, I presume. The typical speed is 768/128. If the download speed is really throttled depending on the upload speed, most of us will have a problem. 😉
Any Bittorrent experts, feel free to jump in here. I thought there was a big difference between 0 upload and some uploading as regards the download speed, and that you can get progessively faster downloads if you are uploading more. Don’t quote me on that or put this in your business plan, because I’m talking off my ass. If you are uploading anything, even if not much, I’m pretty sure you get a faster download than if your system or SOHO router or whatever blocks the upload entirely.
Dave, it does not seem to have anything to do with bittorrent, it’s just a time issue.
Today morning, when some of us tried downloading, there just wasn’t any fast seeder out there (are you seeding in the night, too?).
As soon as I put my own seeder online with your torrent and the directly downloaded file, my torrent-download speed up a lot.
I’m just downloading the file again, same computer, same connection, and it is _fast_. 100k/s, no problem – without my own server seeding.
It’s really just a time issue.
I’m in the midwest of the US, and download early this morning was very slow… Made me wish iPodder had a ‘skip and get later’ button. 😉
Odd. I got both the “You got the Bittorrent feed, whoopie!” file as well as the “You didn’t get the Bittorrent feed, you poor bastard.” Strange. Maybe this is hope that I can get my BT feed going.
Chris, there is no “you didn’t get the bittorrent feed” file. I’m hoping that I wasn’t unclear in that. What I’m trying to say that IF you didn’t get it, you have an issue. Everyone is going to get that MP3 no matter what. I’m trying to give the folks who get that and not the other a heads up that their is an issue.
Another thing to consider is that this was the first time the switch happened. So people like me who normally use Azureus were not properly seeding the file. I got the test file and had to switch the feeds before it starting seeding properly.
So you experiment won’t really be an experiment until the next time you do a podcast. 🙂
Dave, can you post the link links you refer to in your podcast on your blog? Even though I am listening to the podcast via a computer, I am not necessarily sitting at the computer and if other people are like me, I’m not going to re-listen to it to grab the information.
The most usual problem with slow Bittorrent downloads is firewalled ports in your DSL router, I don’t know wich ports Ipodder is using but those should be redirected in your router. Check this for more info on Bittorrent/Ports/Firewalls: http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/25.html
Also, if you happen to be behind a firewall -and with no means to redirect ports- you may want to try Bitcomet http://www.bitcomet.com as it has some features to improve download speeds in that case.
I love Engadget's podcasts. Not only do I always learn something new they have it broken down so a listener can go to their website and view not only the links on the podcast but the time in the podcast it played. That is kick ass. I listen to podcasts while I am doing something else, for example painting the walls of this old house. So I hear something I like, I want to go back and listen to it. I know exactly where to go. It's so organized it's sickening. I wish I had such organization…
Tyme, now you’ve confused me. In the first place, I did publish the regular Bittorrent feed as I always do, a little before I made the switch. Anyone subscribed to the existing Bittorrent feed should indeed have been playing along. Also, I’ve written up an abstract with links I talked about for every single post I’ve ever made. There is one for this one, and every one going all the way back to the first one. When there is a delay in me posting, it is usually because that takes up too much time to address right then.
Daniel, most people are stuck with the Bittorrent baked in to their client. It would be cool if what we are doing here leads to adaptations and improvements in the Bittorrent implementation to expedite things we want to do, like download and seed for some criterion (time or share ratio or whatever), then exit.
Here’s my question, is my ipodder client seeding the bitorrents? Or just pulling them down. It doesn’t seem to be uploading on my end.
Brad, the short answer is yes. It varies wildly from client to client, but some iPodder transactions upload 0 and some in the time it takes them to get down there copy upload up to or even more then the filesize. I’m not sure exactly why that would be, but I can see all ranges of outcomes. Maybe if you have a client with a really fat upload pipe on a corporate LAN or something at the same time that the other clients have slow ones, such that as this one client gets pieces it is able to serve them out faster than it can get them from the other peers. People are worried about the fact that the *Podder* clients don’t stick around and seed, but anything they are doing is load that used to be done by my web server. If the share ratio is 0.25, that’s 25% less I serve out, even if the seed is on my hosted box.
Brad, Ipodder for the moment is just downloading – but at least this doing bittorrent.
If you would be interested in seeding also, I suggest you use directly the bittorrent links from here or use Azureus with RSSFeed to catch them.
Nicole, I’m interested in seeding, but I’m also interested in the bigger picture. Bitorrent is fine and dandy, but as podcasting becomes more and more mainstream it will become less and less a solution, unless the podcasting community is able to convince listeners to seed for them.
I’m in the process of sorting out the details of putting together a podcast, and potential bandwidth costs are the biggest roadblock for me right now.
Nicole, I’m curious as to why you think there is no uploading happening. I can see it. By correlating IP addresses, I can tell this this is someone using iPodder 1.1:
(I elided the IP adress just to not out them as a listener):
This is a line from my Bittorrent tracker log file
x.xx.xxx.xxx – – [16/Nov/2004:17:25:51] “GET /announce?info_hash=%F9%7B%84R%0B%9D%803%FFN%15Z%B9%DF%FCL%8B%F7H%E
B&peer_id=M3-4-2–ce434ef397e5&port=6881&key=fc39385a&uploaded=753664&downloaded=134062740&left=32768&compact=1
HTTP/1.0” 200 58 “-” “BitTorrent/3.4.2”
What this means is that this dude or dudette has downloaded 12M and uploaded 700K. Not huge, but they are indeed uploading. As I said in the previous comment, I’ve some share ratios over 1 on some of these clients. I’ve also seen them at 0. Your mileage may vary.
Oops, I picked a lousy example because those numbers are obviously wrong, and that client reports the same amount left every time. Here’s a better one from the most recently completed download.
xx.xx.xx.xx – – [16/Nov/2004:17:33:38] “GET /announce?info_hash=%F9%7B%84R%0B%9D%803%FFN%15Z%B9%DF%FCL%8B%F7H%E
B&peer_id=M3-4-2–3ebbbe9342ab&port=6881&key=8a812beb&uploaded=13680640&downloaded=18571924&left=0&compact=1 HTT
P/1.0” 200 58 “-” “BitTorrent/3.4.2”
This is also an iPodder, iPodder/1.1.2pre1 to be precise. By the time it had completed downloading the file, it had uploaded 13 M, for a share ratio of ~0.7. That’s a pretty good deal for a transient connection that isn’t sticking around.
Perhaps I’m the only one having this problem, but I don’t think that bashpodder can handle your directmp3.xml format (shell scripts can’t parse every type of xml easily). Cursory examination indicates it needs each <enclosure&rt; to be on a line by itself. Must I upgrade ?
David, no need to upgrade. I tweaked Andrew Grumet’s dir2rss script to add linefeeds after each item tag, so now each is on its own line. I tried to download Bashpodder to try it for myself, but Linc’s box seems to be down or offline.
@Dave hmm because I was told so? At least that is what I think. Or was it just me because it will stop in my firewall? Thanks for clearing this out. :o)
Here’s a bug report against iPodder, looks like it closes down BT as soon as it has the whole file rather than waiting until it has a decent share ratio.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1054252&group_id=118306&atid=681697
All better now. Thanks. I plan to experiment w/BT in the near future perhaps by enhancing bashpodder.
got the latest audioblog podcasted to me via the bittorrent. I’m using version 2.2.3 of iPodderX. I received the bittorrent confirmation message and the latest audioblog for 11/14.
I plan on continuing to manually grab and seed from Azureus as well.
check yer torrentized podcasted audioblog later
peace out