Sharing videos

[jorm]

There has been discussions of writing something like a bittorrent client for gbpvr so users can share shows with other users. We also need to consider what it means to get a show in PAL if we have NTSC?

I wanted to open up a topic so we can discuss this.

Bittorrent is good, but I do not know how good it is for security. I do not want us posting torrent files to each other. That is too dangerous.

That got me thinking about waste. Waste is a private file sharing program. You create a waste ring of your trusted friends and it supports heavy encryption.

WASTE is a mesh-based workgroup tool that allows for encrypted, private communication between distant parties on the internet, independant of local network organization.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/waste/

Ideally if it has a remote interface command line or socket it would be really nice.

Thoughts? Has anyone used waste?

Jorm

[piotre]

Hey jorm,

sounds very interesting. I would love to have a sharing option. If something needs to be tested I sign up as beta-tester.

With my lacking programming skills I can unfortunately not contribute more than testing...

\Piotre

[reven]

i dont think we really need to take into consideration PAL and NTSC, since all files should be converted into divx/xvid first, MVP and 350 users would have to convert them back into a mpeg2 file in order for them to play and they can just convert PAL to NTSC or vice versa at that stage, everyone else shouldnt have any problems playing NTSC and PAL formats.

how would one go about setting up a "waste ring"? can you be in multiple groups or only one group?
eg if A wants to share files with B and be wants to share files with A and C, but C only wants to share files with B and not A, is this possible? (i dont get charged for national bandwidth, but i do for international).
can waste download the same file from multiple sources at once ?

[Darx-starz]

I am up for it. Lets do it. Sounds like Waste is right up our street

[jorm]

> how would one go about setting up a "waste ring"? can you > be in multiple groups or only one group?
It looks like you have your own key that allows people to access your shared files. You can add other keys from other users and it will connect to those clients as well. So you create your ring.

How WASTE Exchanges Keys Between Trusted Hosts
In order for two WASTE hosts to connect to eachother, they need to know eachothers public keys. This can happen two ways. The first way, which is how you would initially connect to a WASTE network, is by manually exchanging public keys. This is clunky, and generally a PITA.

Once a WASTE host is on a WASTE network, however, it can (and is by default) be configured to automatically exchange public keys with other hosts on the network. This happens through the secure links of the network.

The application also can support a form of authenticated auto-discovery of new users -- enabling recent additions to the network to appear in others' contact lists, automatically.

Trust comes into play because a user wishing to gain entry into the network must exchange public keys with a current participant. Depending on users' trust settings, a user that joins the network by linking to an already-collaborating peer is generally available for collaboration with all others, although participants can set their program to require manually authorization of new peers.

WASTE also provides for high-level information security. The system relies on 1,536-bit RSA public keys for session key exchange and authentication. Links between users are encrypted using Blowfish in Propagating Cipher Block Chaining mode. Consequently, text chat and file sharing is secure and encrypted.

http://tinyblip.com/talks/pushdownstairs/tutorial.php

> eg if A wants to share files with B and be wants to share
> files with A and C, but C only wants to share files with B
> and not A, is this possible?
It looks like it is, but I have never tried it myself. The encryption is the big benefit of this approach over bittorrent.


> (i dont get charged for national bandwidth, but i do for
> international).
Strange that they make that distinction. Probably the effects of living on an island.

> can waste download the same file from multiple sources at > once ?
I have not been able to determine this yet.

[Brookfresh]

what a fantastic idea. Would this ever become a plugin?
Just imagine if you had missed show or just forgot to record it, all you would do is look on the list of mpegs ready to download.

[jorm]

the idea is a control plugin would be writen to talk to the client.

[stattik]

What are your thoughts on the transcoding plugin? Would it be an automated process that would automatically share the files on the network then?

Do you think that more more than 50 users would be interested in this? WASTE doesn't seem to scale more than that.

[jorm]

The transcoding process would be automatted. Perhaps the user would specify a certain storage space that they will devote to it. When storage space goes below that threshold we stop transcoding and start cleaning up. Also if a transcoded show is more than 3 weeks old we can remove it.

The 50 user limit is both good and bad. I envision small video sharing groups. I do not think we want anything like Kazaa. Getting sued is not a good plan. If the groups are small and people can trade with the friends they have made on here that is probably safer. The thing that I like about waste over bittorrent is that everything is encrypted.

If the groups are small and heavly encrypted if we find that we are breaking some law (since the US is changing it all the time) nobody will know unless someone in one group rats out his friends.

> Do you think that more more than 50 users would be
> interested in this?
If we had this plugin today we would probably have several hundred people if not thousands interested.

Especially since the filesharring app would not be specific to gbpvr only the plugin and if we spec it out other PVR users can write other plugins for myth or other systems.

[reven]

Quote[/b] ]You'll need one Java base to speed-up the connection other than it would be slow

why would it need to be java based? we should stay away from java in my opinion, i really dont want it anywhere near my system.

Quote[/b] ]Are you working on something we could use to access the web through our MVP units?

the basic idea is to run the program on your computer, and just to write a plugin interface for that program so you can have pretty much full control from a remote, thus it should work on the mvp. you'll just need to set it up on the computer the one time.