Amarok Blog

Wednesday, May 31. 2006

Honor system for BitTorrent

Say a vidcaster wants to earn some money with his content, or a great, but canceled, tv-series wants to make a comeback by publishing the episodes on the web. They could try advertising, but aren't the irritating ads the reason why we don't watch TV anymore? Maybe they can ask for a small fee to download the shows, right after they are produced. But would people pay if the show is for download on the P2P nets a few minutes later? Surely DRM is no solution, who in their right mind pays for a crippled file, that might not play on your favorite mediaplayer or portable device. For independent content producers, hosting large video files will be a problem to. Even if the show becomes popular, the income will not be enough to pay the bandwidth-bill.

The cost of distribution can be avoided when using BitTorrent with your own, private, tracker. And by using fingerprinting instead of DRM, customers can play the file on any player that supports the codec, without restrictions.

What I propose is to distribute the files over BitTorrent in a video format that uses keyframes, like xvid and other MPEG4 codecs.
When seeding a file BitTorrent chops it up in small blocks, some of these blocks will contain a complete keyframe. The blocks containing those keyframes are not distributed over BitTorrent but send to the subscriber individually. The BitTorent program will then add those blocks to the publicly distributed blocks and then assemble the complete file. The difference is that a fingerprint is added to the keyframes, identifying the subscriber. The fingerprint is visible but only until the next keyframe comes along, usually within 30 seconds. So transcoding will not remove the fingerprint and trying to mask it will obscure the video.

The content providers use a service that takes care of the BitTorrent trackers, the finger generation and payment.
Users of this service buy credits which they can use for every video that's distributed by the service.
After downloading the fingerprinted keyframes, a certain amount of credits is deducted from their account. If a user breaks the rules, leaks a file, and gets caught, he loses all of his remaining credits. If there aren't any credits left, the user gets excluded from the service for a while.

The big pluses:
Bandwidth cost are reduced with BitTorrent. No DRM is used, yet illegal distribution is discouraged by the honor system.
If similar fingerprinting techniques are possible for other kind of codecs, like mp3, they might be distributed in the same way.

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 10:36

Just for the log...

...the first piece of opensource, I've ever written. Back at the age of 15, pretty much exactly 10 years ago. Funnily back then nobody really seemed to care or know what opensource is. Neither did anyone really realize the power behind. Except a few developers, of course. Nice to see how things have changed in retrospect. Let's just imagine what could be done in another decade. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks to google for caching it. I wouldn't have a backup otherwise, I reckon.

COMUnit at Google Groups.

Posted by eean in eean at 01:07

Just for the log...

Posted by in muesli at 01:07

Tuesday, May 30. 2006

K3M

I had a great time at the meeting, there’s nothing like the intensity of a hackathon, and actual face-to-face discussion to make you super productive. Many thanks to KDE NL for organising the event, especially since we offered such amazing disorganisation in return!

For fun, here’s me, markey and muesli (left-to-right) in Amsterdam, and then at aKademy 2 years ago in Stutgart.

mxcl, markey, muesli

muesli, markey, mxcl

I picked on us three as there was the comparison shot. Overtime though we’ve been visited by more and more people, some submitted a patch or two then joined development more actively. Getting involved really is that easy. Send a patch, come to IRC, prove you cope with the sometimes obscure mxcl/oggb4mp3/sebr sense of humor and you’ll soon be being asked for your opinion on stuff.

Sebr mentioned that we have an excellent development team quite a few times at the meet, and it’s true. And may it long continue because we work well as a group and have each our own unique talents that when combined, keep the quality high.

That’s not to say we can’t improve, and we discussed among other things, what should be done to make code quality higher, while not lessening release rate, and how to keep exploring new features, without making amaroK unwelcoming to new (and old) users.

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 13:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

K3M

For fun, here’s me, markey and muesli (left-to-right) in Amsterdam, and then at aKademy 2 years ago in Stutgart.

mxcl, markey, muesli

muesli, markey, mxcl

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 09:47

Genesis - 1.4.1 beta1

As I was busy reading the da vinci code, which I had to write an disquisition about, I recently got notified that there will be a beta release of amaroK 1.4.1, reason -> K4M3 (K3M). A view into my mailbox showed me about 100 unread mails in the commits folder...usually the amount doesn't get > 45

So, on Sunday+2weeks (06-06-18) we will probably pull out amaroK 1.4.1 beta1 - advanced amaroK users might know that we don't do betas for x.x.y releases, reason for this beta are enormous changes in the GUI as well as the core.
Those are mostly results of K4M3 (kde 4 mutlimedia meeting) which had lead to really great improvements and ideas.
We plan 1.4.1 for 2 weeks after the beta (if there are no big problems) and probably apply a string freeze 1 week before release.

As of now trunk includes:

changed GUI - context tab got removed and fights with the playlist for user's attention
startup improvements - currently about 50%
bugs bugs bugs
bugfixes for other bugs

I'm still trying to sort out the bugs in the amaroK nightly script, which moved together with my server from SUSE to Kubuntu (woooohoooo!). Not only that this is the first somewhat, trying to be professional, work in Ruby (using 4 times an external app - on 200 lines!) also getting the debian dir to work properly with SVN snapshots is really nifty stuff ... I really hope to get it done within the next few weeks. Maybe before 1.4.1 final

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 06:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, May 28. 2006

Face-lifting amaroK

At K4M, we decided that amaroK's context view should get a more prominent place. After some discussion, a tabbed Playlist/Context/Wiki/Lyrics view seemed to be the way to go. So we just did a dirty hack to try it out:

This could somehow work, but Florian from Open Usability pointed a lot of problems, and we haven't been satisfied with the huge number of tabs either ("4 is just too many" is a recurring theme here). So we did a second try using a splitter:

This showed that actual code for experimenting is much better than just mock-ups. And it also showed us that we prefer this Kmail-like look - expect this to see in one of your next amaroK installs!

Posted by Martin Aumueller in aumuell at 06:02 | Comments (75) | Trackbacks (0)

More 2.0 than just amaroK!

The K3M meeting has been supremely productive for all attendees. If you haven’t been reading up, the coolest things in amaroK have been: Vastly improved start times, inotify signals for collection scanning, porting to KDE/Qt4 (runs!!), UI redesigns and last.fm integrations.

In our developer conference, we discussed total redesign of the amaroK core, using the [...]

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 05:01

Saturday, May 27. 2006

Evolution of Spam

I was going to tell you all about the events of the K3M meeting, but since everybody has already done that, I’ll refrain until I have something specific and unique to tell of.
Instead, I wanted to share some of the funny spam I have been receiving - as of this morning infact. The top [...]

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 14:47

Tuesday, May 23. 2006

All About Eye-Candy

today kapilzad publish his KDE Spectra proposal series for KDE...

Most important thing for me is KDE Spectra Player - meant as "KDE should have a powerful multimedia player, with cool graphics and should be like a file-browser"

powerful media player: just wondered why his mockup uses stuff named suroor.mp3 - dunno tags? dunno vorbis?
cool graphics: which actually means as big that your eyes start bleeding because you have to move them 3 cm to see another button (big + shiny != cool)
should be like a file-browser: aye, since one doesn't have tags...

So, there is a reason why this proposal got quite some negative votes, and it's not only amaroK.

Anyway, the whole KDE Spectra propal series is missing a good point, the whole idea lacks usability (thought of a non-usability expert), functionality and is actually only about eye-candy (allthough I wonder whether hundreds awful BIG buttons are still eye-candy)

This is not how I'd like to see KDE!!!

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 18:10 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

gearing up

We've been getting into some of the nitty gritty details of the multimedia meeting in the Netherlands this weekend. Like with the help of the Wikipedia picture of Amsterdam's Centraal Station, we decided that I would meet Leinir on the west side of the main entrance on that blank wall. Hoo-ray for the Internet.

First order of business: How do you pronounce Leinir?

Since I dislike walking, and its the "when in Rome" thing to do besides, I'll probably be renting a bicycle for Thursday. If I'm not too jetlagged, and after looking at the other touristy things to do during the day in Amsterdam, I decided to see the Van Gogh museum again. The things I didn't do in Amsterdam the last time, like the Anne Frank house or the Heinkein Experience (Come on Heinkein, 10 Euros? Budweiser makes watery beer, but at least Grant's farm is free and has a zoo!) still don't sound as appealing.

Posted by eean in eean at 05:07 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, May 22. 2006

Notice the nerdification

So, how does one notice that he becomes more than a usual geek? Well, if he starts replacing mathematical variables with initialism....

Like for example K (for german Kapital = capital) with KDE. This way K0 (which is base value) becomes KDE0

So happened to me :S
apachelogger <--- nerd!!! Here is an excerpt of latest mathematics test:

Actually this appearance was quite funny, since my maths teacher used to use GNOME

So maybe it was just my unbelivable cynicism? Dunno! Maybe this post is even part of that cynicism? ;-D

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 12:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Travel plugs

I’ll be taking my laptop with me to Holland for the K3M meeting, and was wanting to use it on the plane. I’m flying Cathay Pacific, in economy class - does anybody know the details for which adaptor I will need to purchase? I couldn’t find this out, and Cathay doesn’t have an office [...]

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 03:51

Sunday, May 21. 2006

wahoo bug in amaroK

So the kubuntu.de users discovered a real strange bug in amaroK described at http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125210.

It basically says, that amaroK doesn't honor the Show Splashscreen setting from a kiosk config.
Kubuntu uses such kiosk configs to provde the simplified system with lot of preconfigured stuff, so a Kubuntu user (probably only dapper ones) is not able to deactivate the splash screen. Doesn't sound important, it isn't - but some dislike our 1.4.0 splash screeny ..... so give the user what he demands

Plus: bugs suck anyway, imporant or not.

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 17:29 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)