The Blimp project
For the longest time, bittorent has been largely the domain of geeks the internet over yet, despite it’s incredible usefulness of being able to send files without the need for expensive servers, it’s overly technical nature of torrent files, clients, upload ratios and abillity to hose a connection if not properly managed leave it’s best utilization out of the reach of most.
The Blimp’s aim is to take existing technology and make it far more accessible by taking care of problems, both in terms of utilization and management, making itself as invisible as something like Flash or HTTPS.
Currently looking at Webkit and Libtorrent for candidates to build from, but I’ve only got a bit of C# experience, so it’s going to be a while to re/learn, in which time, I thought I’d get some feedback on the idea. If someone wants to take this over, you’d be doing great work (And I got vidjagaems I’d rather be making.).
First Phase: Prototype/Proof-of-concept.
My first idea of a way to better utilize bittorent was by making a deamon, instead of a client, that any program on the computer could ask to fetch files. A good showcase for this would be by rendering the following code, consisting of HTML5 video tags and Magnet links (Expanded to make it more readable.).
<video width="1024" height="720" controls="controls"> <source src="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:54dec3e7b1169fad5587d5a9e30fafa92097eab7 &dn=Big+Buck+Bunny+%282008%29+BRRip+720p+x264+-MitZep &tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80 &tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80 &tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80" type="video/mp4" />Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Side note: For those of you unfamiliar with Magnet Links if you click this version of the above Magnet URI, it will download the link through your torrent client of choice.
Without any complication on the part of the user, when the browser loads the page, it immediately sends the relavent info onto The Blimp which looks up peers ready for the video being clicked. If a click comes, it downloads the file, grabbing chunks in order, and passing them back to the browser to render.
As part of the prototype phase, making this work with with the audio tag and anchor tag (E.g. Clicking to download an Ubuntu ISO.) would be useful to give an example the final project’s uses. Though just having a video playing from no fixed source would be a great achievement.
Second Phase: Core features.
A feature I’ve nicknamed Fleeting, Blimp deamons on the same local network can be told to work as one. Either by having a single computer (E.g. A large desktop or server with CAT5 connection.) do all dealings with the internet at large or a redundant cluster of deamons which, when they realise one of their number has gone offline, will download and upload chunks on behalf of their counterparts, making it easier to utilise upload bandwidth at times of day not usually busy.
In addition to programs being able to ask for files, they can also place a temporary restriction on all deamons on the network, for instance when a Skype call comes in or you connect to a game server, downloads would be reduced to half and uploads could be temporarily stopped (Some of us only get 50kB/s up.) to make way for more latency crucial tasks.
Enough for now.
I’ll stop there before I run out of steam. A high quality user interface (Those bittorrent links are a pain to copy.) could be provided by some kind of extension and, though I’ll probably save it for another project, once storage has been separated from location, some use of authentication technology could be used to make entire websites distributable without any central location.
