eDonkey vs TOR vs Free Haven vs Publius

These four all employ/rely on a set of rather static/well-known dedicated servers. However, only eDonkey and Free Haven get the privilege of being classified as peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. This story will tells you why !

to be continued ....

Venice, first look

Yesterday, one guy in a P2P mailing list was kind enough to agree to send me an invitation to the Vennice project beta-release. Have been in their (TVP) waiting list for several weeks and patience has run out, as people keep releasing blogs about their expeirence with TVP.

This morning, checking work email, got invitation from the kind fellow and started installing and playing around with it. Hours later, checking Gmail, found out that TVP has just sent me another invitation (turned out that i had moved to the top of the waiting list). Talk about irony !!

Anyway, playing around with The Venice Project is really such a great experience. These guys really know how to make a simple, yet professional and attractive user interface. Quality of the contetn is also good (around Rmvb quality), even though not very diverse at the moment. Most of them are cheap music or discovery type of videos.

About speed, it takes normally about 3-5 seconds to start watching (after clicking on the channel). It makes me think of Skype, which also take about that much to log-in and about 2-4 seconds to start chatting (voice) with friends. Don't know how this will change in prototion to network condition. This morning, my network is pretty fast (no one else was leeching it), so this speed is within expectation. Will test it this evening where the network will be crippled down signifcantly. So far, so good.
On the other hand, this high quality of service also comes at the expense of costly bandwith. Officially, TVP tells user that watching a one-hour video would cost them about 300MB for downloading and 200MB for uploading. This non bandwidth-friendly feature would present as one of the biggest obstacle for large-scale deployment of TVP. As the moment, most ISPs are well aware of Bittorrent as a bandwidth sucking monster and try to limit users from using such protocol, by charging more money, moving away from unlimited bandwidth offers. TVP would be the next victim. For home user, they are willing to pay extra money for better, on-demand entertainment. Students (living in University accomodation), however, could not be very thrilled with the prespective, as they have to live with strict bandwidth usage regulation , and just don't want their Internet connection cut off.

Still don't know how long before TVP give me some token/invitation so i could invite some more friends to play with it.

Venice project to complete the Video on Demand zigsaw ??

It has been several weeks since Venice project announced their resitricted beta-release testing, and i still haven't got any invitation yet (should've begged somebody in some mailing-lists or forums).

Feedbacks have been quite positive, some even released very tempting screenshot of the project. As much as its creators try to hide details, beta-testers could not help but sharing their experiences to the world. Few screenshots could be found here.

So on what ground that people believe that The Venice Project to be the next best thing ? It's all about Video on Demand. VoD, which is essentially a services that allow users to watch their favourite videos, be it movies/music clip ..., any time, on-demand. This concept has been around for years, and attracted a lot of academic research to improve user-perceived Quality-of-Service. Only recently do people see it come to reality, with the luxury of broadband connection.

Just to be more precise, there are two types of VoD services:
* One is to make the video files available for download, so that user could download the entire content to his PC and watch it anytime, anywhere. This is very convenient, if user have enough space in their hard drive (which seems trivial nowadays), and if he is willing to wait until the download complete. Traditionaly, this service is provided in a client-server model with the content provider host a server to serve all download. The next improvement is to use Content Distribution Network (CDN) such as Akamai, which make uses of third-party facility to boost user's sastifaction, in the expense of increased cost. Recently, with the help of P2P techonolgy such as Bittorrent, P2P-aware protocol such as Magnet-link, the download time could be significantly shortened. Zudeo, service from Azuerus, does exactly that. Being so promising, Zudeo has been chosen by BBC to broadcast their comedy shows (Little Britain ...).
With traditional client-server model, it seems seasy to enforce a payment system so that user must pay to get access to the content. However, with P2P model, it's still very unclear to me how the content provider is going to do about that, as more people downloading means better performance.

* Second type of VoD, which is quite ideal, is streaming Video on Demand. User can watch content in real-time, but via streaming. Benefits are that he doesn't need to wait until the download complete, and does not need a lot of space to store the entire video. It's believed to be extremely useful in the future, where users moving from laptop, PC to mobile phone and PDA, which apprantly do not offer as much space. Of course, if user can view the stream, he should be able to save it as well (just like download). However, there are many challenges. As the nature of streaming is a real-time service, timely delivery is crucial. Any delay results in significant degradation of quality, and user would likely give up. As contrast to download VoD, this timing matter does not affect user satisfaction very much, as long as the final file is in good quality.
There is one variation of streaming VoD, which is live streaming. To many suprise, live streaming systems seem more easy to implement than tradition VoD. This is due to the fact that while watching live content, one must be synchronized with others' view, many users are watching the same content, which turns out to be ideal environment for P2P model. Many real-life systems have been implemented and widely used, with incredible user's satisfaction.

On the other hand, user in traditional VoD network do not synchronize his view with other. In fact, one should even be possible to fast forward or seek back the content, anywhere he wants. As this streaming model is asynchronous, traditional client-server, even with the help of CDN network, would not survive against large number of users (especially in flash-crowd even, where a new content suddendly attract enormous attention from many users). That desires for a P2P model, which seems to be the mission for The Venice Project to fullfil. There have been many proposed models, many researches toward a robust, scalable, cost-effective P2P streaming VoD system, but none has been widely deployed. Benefit from this model is two-fold. First, content provider is relieved from the bandwidth burden, especially if the content is not very popular so that many users pay for it. Second, user would experience higher quality of service, even in a flash-crowd event.

From the screenshots and recent comments, The Venice Project will be offering video in High-Definition quality. That is the way to go. High expectation from the creators of Skype to deliever the next best thing on the Internet. As Skype breaks the traditional telecommunication way of communicating, The Venice Project will again break the traditional television-way of watching video ??

The Scene - root of all files

I can't believe i didn't know about the show called TheScene until 2007 (1-1-2007 to be precise). Quite good, and quite strange. I didn't regret spending hours downloading and watching 15 episodes, for the simple reason that it tell an "authentic" story about origin of pirated files. The file-sharing world all begins from a place named "The Scene".

This *free-for-download* show answers questions you may have encoutered: how the Chinese gets hold of crystal-clear DVD-quality movies way before releases ? As it's made clear during the show, no one can imagine that behind was a whole infrastructure, where security, mutal-trust relationship, and anonymity are at uttermost importance.

1. A famous ripping group called CPX, which is speialized in releasing DVD-quality priated movies, and has gained their reputation of being the fastest, most reliable ripping group in the world. I have seen some files containing substring of CPX in it, or am i just imagining ?

2. Member of this group consists of:
* A source: a person ideally working at a DVD pressing plant (in Hollyword). He would have access to latest, newest movies right after them being edited/made. This is the root of the chain, where everything gets started.
* Encoders/Ripping experts: after acquiring the source, at least two people would rip and encode the original data into DVD-files and the priated versions of the data would be ready to run within one or two hours.
* Uploader/Distributor: this guy knows a lot about security and is responsible for uploading "products" to a extremely secure FTP server, and then controls access to those files.

3. Mutual trust if crucial for the group to run. To my surprise, however, none of those members know each other in person. They were all using an IRC chatroom for that, and known by their nickname. They all work hard to build great reputation for these nicknames, because it's the only base for trust, relationship, source access and for the money.

4. Anonymity means jail or no jail: they are working secretly under searches of the federal polices. They make deal with so-called "Asian mafias" who are capable of whatever you've seen in the movies. They have to upload content to a thrid-party FTP server, where logs are available on-demand of the RIAA or MPAA. Millions of risks. They handle it in simplest way possible, by spoofing their IP address.


Even though there are things i still don't quite understand. But a lot have been learned from the first 15 episodes:

a) Everyone thinks that P2P is the main distribution chain for pirated movies as well as other material. True. But after all, FTP is still, still the only mechanism used for making them all available. A ripping group creates the movies, uploads them to a FTP server, closes deals and makes ton of money from allowing access to these. And after a while, they will move down to a next level of the distribution chain: P2P, just for normal/home users to download and enjoy.

b) How powerful a person could be with just one comptuer and a handful of equipments. Members of the CPX group all have a normal job, normal life. Leader of the group, presumably a NYU student, doesn't even take a computer science course, he's not even a hard-core hacker (but does have a friend who is); yet seen as the most powerful person behind the files that are being distributed legally.

c) How the music/recording industry can't solve their problems by sueing P2P file-sharer/individual users for what they download. The true problem all lies in their process of mananing the making and distribution of their products. Remember, no pirated releases without person in the industry/DVD-pressing plant leaking the content.


... And many more after you seeing the shows. All are here. They are made for free download. Note that season 1 can be found at some mirror sites listed in there.