Democracy player 0.9 [LWN.net]

Last February, the Participatory Culture Foundation announced its existence with the launch of the "Democracy" player, billed as "the world's first comprehensive open source Internet TV system." Many Linux users may be excused for not trying out the program at that time; despite being a GPL-licensed program, Democracy had not been ported to the Linux platform.

That situation has now changed; on September 11, Democracy 0.9 was announced. It runs on Linux, and packages for Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, and Ubuntu are provided; the source is available for everybody else. Beyond the Linux port, this version promises a polished user interface, a new playlist capability, Flash video support, and more. Your editor clearly had no choice; a tool like this simply must be tried out.

Unfortunately, the Democracy experience is still rather spotty at best. It requires the installation of a number of proprietary codecs (which is not particularly surprising, once one thinks about it - the Democracy developers will have no magic solutions there). The system can be sluggish to respond, and your editor never was able to get it to display a video in its own window. It also would not explain why it failed to display anything, so there was little to be done about it.

But your editor was able to get far enough to realize one important thing: video display is not really what Democracy is about in the first place. This tool is really a sort of video feed aggregator for free video content; it has all the required features for sorting feeds into categories, collecting votes for interesting videos, using BitTorrent to download videos in a provider-friendly way, and more. There is also significant support for people who want to create their own video feeds.

What Democracy and its supporting foundation are trying to do is to get as many people as possible into the business of creating and distributing interesting content. The term "Internet TV" is somewhat off the mark - Democracy will suit couch potatoes just fine, but its real purpose is to get them off their couches and participating in the process. It is trying to create a world where video content is free, universal, and compelling - so it has tools for finding and distributing videos but a distinct lack of DRM support.

This is an important goal - television is too important to leave to the TV companies. If the Democracy system can help to bring more free content into existence, it will have done a good thing. Some progress in that direction has been made: there are, it is said, some 600 channels of free content available now, and, doubtless, more to come. The current code has real promise; it looks like a capable system for discovering, distributing, and managing interesting video content. If they can get past the remaining troublesome issues, the Democracy hackers will have created a valuable tool indeed.

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Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 14, 2006 8:28 UTC (Thu) by MathFox (guest, #6104) [Link]

There are few ISPs in the world that really understand the Internet. The Internet Protocol is designed in such a way that every node can act both as a server and a client: all nodes are peers.
If you give a customer an "allways on" internet connection, he can run servers. The best providers give a static IP for free with their ADSL or Cable Internet link and allow their users to run servers at home.

The Telcos and Cable companies think in terms of "producers" and "consumers" of content; selling one way "download tubes" from the media companies to their customers. Reality shows that "Smallcast" works better on the internet than "Broadcast". It is easy to form self-sustained "special interest groups" that are too small to be reached by the traditional media.
The Internet business models are based on two way communication, like distributed (Open Source) software development, collaborative editing (Wiki), bulletin boards, etc. Everyone can be a publisher on the Internet. Bittorrent and other forms of distributed distribution fit naturally in a network of peers. For the Internet, my computer is just as important as LWN's servers. Go to your ISP and demand Internet publishing rights if you haven't got them allready.

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 14, 2006 17:55 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I think the ISPs are well aware of how the Internet was designed to work, and they work overtime to work around that architecture. They know that it generally costs more to connect up a server than to connect up typical home web-browsing computer. And they know that people who don't plan to run servers aren't willing to pay the price for a big enough pipe to do so.

Therefore, they try hard to segment the market and supply small pipes to home web-browsing computers at low prices. That's not easy because as you point out, the Internet isn't set up for that. You have to do ugly things like 1) require unenforceable promises from your customers not to run "servers" and 2) throttle packets containing certain port numbers. But it beats the alternative of distributing the cost of high volume servers to small-volume users, and thus drive all small volume users to your competitors.

There's a simple alternative I really wish ISPs would use: charge the user for his own traffic. Then the user can decide for himself whether it's worthwhile to upload or download a movie, rather than the ISP peeking at the content and making a value judgement as to how important it is.

I don't think demanding publishing rights from one's ISP is a big deal. I think most are more than willing to sell them to you (it's called business class IP service). Demanding that they bill your non-publishing neighbors for it is harder.

Data volume charging in Australia

Posted Sep 15, 2006 1:23 UTC (Fri) by mbg (subscriber, #4940) [Link]

Data volume charges and volume caps are common in Australia. Volume charging began with higher tier providers and these days applies to most home users as well. ISPs don't seem to have any problem administering these schemes.

Most home user contracts only have limits/charges for downstream traffic (which means ISPs still get hurt by BitTorrent to some degree).

Another interesting point is that most home users opt for contracts with caps rather than volume charges per se. Typically the connection will be throttled to 64Kbps downstream when the cap is exceeded.

There are other wrinkles to this model that vary from ISP to ISP: free traffic to the ISP's mirrors, free traffic from "local" endpoints (determined by peering arrangements), etc. etc.

OTOH hosting in Australia is far more expensive than in the US (perhaps due to economies of scale).

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 14, 2006 15:18 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

My impression is that BT is a reasonably efficient protocol, so, if BT is 70% of ISP traffic, that means that chances are ~35% of ISP traffic (the download portions, on average half of the traffic) is content most easily accessed with BT. Which is to say that, in terms of end users getting data, BT is more useful than all other protocols combined (since, obviously, these protocols aren't providing more than 30% of the traffic in user data).

Of course, these statistics are probably not really accurate, because if they were, ISPs would probably work on optimizing BT instead of restricting it. If BT is a significant application, there's clearly a bandwidth-utilization benefit to proxying it for customers, such that the ISP responds on the user's behalf (avoiding the slow user-ISP upstream connection) and backs all of the upload requests for the same blocks from different customers with the same ISP-side storage, as well as being an extra-fast source for these blocks for other customers who might want them.

What's more likely is that BT is 70-80% of upstream ISP traffic, which is plausible simply because there isn't all that much other upstream ISP traffic. And it does make sense in this case to throttle the BT traffic, because most other things are performance-limited by round-trip times, so it matters a lot of customer perception of connection speeds that (for example) HTTP requests are transmitted promptly and reliably, whereas BT upload performance is generally relatively insensitive to whether particular packets get dropped.

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 15, 2006 15:18 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

ISPs should LOVE Bittorrent.

Do you know why?

Because it gives people a reason why they would want to purchase the higher speed connections aviable from them. Otherwise if your restricted to just HTTP then who realy gives a shit once you get above 256Mbps download and 64Mbps upload? Even with gaming it doesn't realy matter once you have a low latency.

File sharing technology is driving internet demand. The Internet is a PEER TO PEER network and when people use it as such it provides the most value from them. Who wants to use skype when you can do a better job just by directly going peer to peer? Its just that nobody has bothered to make a nice program for doing that in Windows yet and inviduals generally don't have DNS names associated with their computers.. YET.

Beleive you me, if ISPs were hurt by bittorrent then they wouldn't be defending their users against the likes of the RIAA. Until very recently every high speed ISP provider advertisement included things like 'download music, movies, and media faster and better!!'

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 14, 2006 16:22 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

No the reason for throttling was probably the daily BLOCK this address or get sued emails that the RIAA and MPAA send out. Since Bittorrent had legitimate uses with ISOs and other large files.. a lot of ISPs and colleges allowed it through. Now it is mostly sharing of copyrighted material which I am guessing that the RIAA and MPAA have large clusters now looking for.

Bit Torrent throttling

Posted Sep 14, 2006 17:37 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Throttling means slowing down, not blocking. I doubt slowing down the copyright violations is any businessman's response to a threat of lawsuit for copyright violation.

But I know some providers (schools, companies) have in fact blocked BT, and sometimes it's because of fear of being liable for the copyright violations and other times it's because they believe the kinds of data transfers that are typically done by BT do not fit the goals of their particular network.

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 17, 2006 22:49 UTC (Sun) by mitchskin (subscriber, #32405) [Link]

Since a large number of ISPs refuse to turn on multicast, it was more or less inevitable that someone would come up with a different way to distribute lots of data to lots of people.

Still, I think there must be a way of combining multicast with BT to get the best of both--the bandwidth advantages of multicast combined with a scalable way for receivers to get the pieces they missed.

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 19, 2006 15:18 UTC (Tue) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link]

Multicast solves the download problem how exactly? Unless everyone decides to download at precisely the same time.

Rich.

Democracy player 0.9

Posted Sep 19, 2006 17:45 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

It wouldn't be BitTorrent exactly, but ...

One way to do multicast download is to pick a bandwidth to divide by the server's total output bandwidth. Say, 4 KB/s chunks out of 128 KB/s. That would be 32 streams. Each stream sends out every 32nd block. Stream 1 sends block 1,33,65,...,etc.

With multicast, the modem users subscribe to only one stream. I think 4 KB/s will fit. T1 users subscribe to all streams. For the modem user, when he gets all of stream 1, then he hops onto stream 2. There should be a TCP backup system for requesting individual blocks that were missed or corrupted.

With this, there would be ONE output stream from the server to his ISP's multicast router. From there, each downstream multicast router gets a copy of the stream. And when it reaches a router that does not understand multicast or an individual client, the router has to individually deliver each stream.

Even though this is more efficient than BitTorrent, I have the impression that ISPs don't like multicast though, because they have to set up expensive routers for it, the bandwidth load is on the ISP instead of the customer, and bandwidth accounting between network peers is hard to do.