Use A Custom Miro For Church Videos and Conference

#11

RussellHltn wrote:I hadn't thought of that, but how secure is the medium from tampering? Would it be possible to insert a segment from some other video into the data stream by spoofing the desired data? Granted, I don't think it's happened so far, but then that's not to say it won't given the right motivation. I don't see connecting to church servers for information from where to download as providing protection from that.

Also a MD5 hash of the segments would be hard to spoof due to a few mathematical laws surrounding hashing. Anyway the church servers could provide the list and the hashs to the client and if the client got a bad segment it would then select another server to download from.

WelchTC · #12

tomw wrote:This is an interesting idea. Currently if the Church holds the copyright of the material and does not grant individuals the right to redistribute the material, how does that play in with Bittorrent? Technically people are redistributing it with Bittorrent, but not in any kind of malicious way.

Tom

I spoke with our legal department and they indicated that they don't see legal problem if they chose to distribute the content via bittorrent. That is not saying that they will, only that they could if they wanted.

Also, people referred me to http://www.byu.tv where you can get the sessions of general conference as well as other church related multi-media. The nice thing about this site is that it uses a cool technology from a company locally here called "Move Networks". The player (unfortunately only available for Windows and Mac) does an excellent job at adjusting to the bandwidth and preserves audio over video. So if your bandwidth is poor, you will hear the audio flawlessly while the video may chuck or pixelate at times.

Tom

MikeHillyer-p40 · #13

The move player is not bad but here's the thing:

Move Network: As more people try to get the content, everyone's connection becomes slower as people compete for the limited bandwidth.

Bittorrent: As more people try to get the content, aggregate bandwidth increases because each time a member downloads a chunk of the content, they become a source for the chunk. This means that if you were distributing conference through this kind of technology people could be grabbing sessions at the maximum speed of their connection. Since they would be downloading fixed videos, they would be able to get broadcast quality video.

Another factor is that byu.tv only shows you the day's video, with Miro we could create a persistent, categorized and tagged catalog of media that members could browse and download on demand.

#14

My experience with Move Networks is that during a high demand showing (BYU devotional, General Conference, etc) the lag gets so bad that it throws you one or two hours behind schedule even for audio only.

WelchTC · #15

thedqs wrote:My experience with Move Networks is that during a high demand showing (BYU devotional, General Conference, etc) the lag gets so bad that it throws you one or two hours behind schedule even for audio only.

Good feedback, I'll pass it along.

Tom

MikeHillyer-p40 · #16

When the Saturday morning session ended I turned on Move networks because the afternoon session was not being shown by my cable provider.

At 12:10 the move feed was 500K/s and looked broadcast quality.

At 1:50 the move feed was 32K/s and looked like an old Seminary filmstrip with about one video frame every 3 seconds. Audio paused a lot. When we finally switched to a alternate feed (won't tell which, muahaha) we discovered that we were two full talks behind the live conference.

Again, with streaming video through bittorrent or the CMU technology we'd have the opposite effect, the individual bandwidth would increase as there were more members streaming, not decrease. The church's bandwidth consumption would likely go *down* since they would only feed the first layer of streamers, who would feed the next and the next until all members were serving conference to eachother.

Think of it like the law of consecration for bandwidth

#17

I wouldn't mind devoting bandwidth to help spread conference.

Personally I think that this would be a great solution, especially since even church servers could return to sending video out instead of just audio. (Audio was done because of the bandwidth demand on church servers)

fraserredmond · #18

Then again, maybe we just need to wait another year or so and the technology will be completely ready for streaming with P2P. China's got a P2P network that was "50% faster than bittorrent"

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/16/50 ... nt-i-want/

I'd be another that'd be happy to consecrate my bandwidth to building up the kingdom.... and it'd be nice if people were encouraged to continue sharing for a week or so, as out here in NZ we have to watch it a week later because our timezone is 18 hours ahead of the US.

MikeHillyer-p40 · #19

Actually the link claims it is 50 times faster, but I'd take it with a grain of salt. That said, I can currently hit 900K/s on a bittorrent of Linux when the latest version is first released and everyone is pulling it.

As for the part about still sharing in a week, Miro by default holds and continues sharing downloaded video content for a week after the user watches it unless they explicitly mark it to be kept permanently. This of course means that if members were pulling conference using queues of single talk videos through Miro, they would be sharing those for at least a week, allowing any member in the network to get the videos at a decent speed up to a week after conference.

And of course, this means a lot less bandwidth usage for the church to publish the video archives. I just downloaded one session in full and it was 900 megs, which really adds up if the archives are a popular service. Much better to know that only a few chunks come from the church's bandwidth and the rest is shared out by members who are also downloading.

fraserredmond · #20

wow! 900mb per session... thats definitely going to add up!

It'd be interesting to know how many people watched the last conference via Move Networks.