Home ›

Tribler: BitTorrent and Beyond

Jan 15, 2009  By Doc Searls

P2P (peer-to-peer) is the nature of the Net. You can fight that, or you can embrace it. Here in the US, the mainstream entertainment business has mostly been fighting it. Hollywood and its phone and cable company allies have long regarded P2P, and BitTorrent in particular, as a copyright piracy system and a bandwidth hog. In the European Union, however, P2P is more than accepted: it's supported by the Union itself.

Early last year, the EU granted 14 million euros to P2P-Next, a consortium of 21 media companies and universities, including the BBC, Delft University of Technology, the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The purpose of the grant is “to develop a Europe-wide 'next-generation' Internet television distribution system, based on P2P and social interaction”. (An additional 5 million euros is also being donated by some of the P2P-Next partners, for a total of 19 million euros.) The project has a four-year span and will include technical trials of new media applications on many devices.

“Everything we're doing is based on open source”, says Johan Pouwelse, PhD, scientific director of P2P-Next and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Delft. The good doctor also runs P2P-Next's first trial application: Tribler (pronounced “tribe-ler”), a BitTorrent-based client with no servers and a “zero-cost” business model. Tribler provides an all-in-one way to find, consume and share media.

But Tribler goes beyond BitTorrent to support live streaming and other enhancements. The project's Research page lists 26 allied development projects, including six that are already completed and operational. If you're looking to help media evolve past the TV model, there's a rich pile of possibilities on the Tribler project list.

The Tribler download page lists two Linux sources: Ubuntu Linux and “GNU+Linux/Source”.

Check it out, and let us know how it works for you (or, you for it).

______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

you might want to mention

Jonny's picture
Submitted by Jonny (not verified) on Thu, 01/15/2009 - 18:09.

the ubuntu package is for hardy, not intrepid

White Paper
More Resources
Fabric-Based Computing Enables Optimized Hyperscale Data Centers

Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions