[DMCA-Activists] Article on P2P Radio Streaming (Peercast + Streamer)

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from Pho list)


-------- Original Message --------
   Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 10:59:14 -0800
  From: "Joe Wojdacz" <address@hidden>
     To: <address@hidden>


 Yet another demonstration of the ability of Internet
technology to adapt to new legal, social and market
environments.   Oh, and publishers....you're next.

Joe


> http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/09/24/p2pradio.html


Internet Radio the P2P Way

by Howard Wen
09/24/2002 


First there was AM. Then FM. Now, the next evolution in
radio broadcast technology could very well be "P2P."


What could be even more controversial than Internet
radio/audio broadcasting--which has made headlines this
year  over the issue of royalty payments--and P2P file
sharing? Probably the merging together of these banes of the
music  industry. Two P2P clients, PeerCast and Streamer, are
exactly that. Without the need to have your own dedicated 
server, these programs let you stream audio files to other
users on a P2P network. Essentially, you can run your own 
Internet radio station whenever you start up your computer
and get online.

PeerCast runs on both Linux and Windows and, while the code
is not under open source presently (there are plans to  put
it under open source soon), it is free for anyone to
download and use. Streamer, though not as technically 
sophisticated as PeerCast, is open source and, for now,
available only for Windows. Both stream MP3 files, and 
PeerCast can also broadcast audio files encoded in the Ogg
Vorbis format.

PeerCast is being developed by a small group, led by Giles
Goddard. Goddard, originally from the U.K., resides in 
Kyoto, Japan where he does contract game-programming work
for Nintendo. As for the two people who work with him  on
PeerCast: "It's a little tricky to elaborate on who the
others are because they work for companies that wouldn't 
support this project. One of them is involved with the music
industry," says the 31-year-old Goddard. "So I'm usually
the  scapegoat for all of this." There's only one man to
blame for Streamer: Iain McLeod of Warrington, U.K., who
describes himself as a  "self-employed computer game
creator." Lately, however, the 39-year-old has been finding
himself working more on  Streamer, a program which he
unabashedly describes as "pirate radio for the digital age"
and admits that he created it  in response to the music
industry's recent efforts to shut down Internet radio
stations over royalty payments.

But the two men both feel that their programs can help music
artists get their work heard outside of traditional radio 
broadcasting. "I think it's important for developers to work
on constructive projects that help artists and listeners at
the  same time, rather than just allowing people to rip off
their work," says Goddard.

Building a (Virtual) Radio Network PeerCast was devised
about a year ago when Goddard experimented with using
Gnutella for uses other than file  sharing. The initial
incarnation of PeerCast was as an application that looked at
query packets to compile a top 1,000  list of the musical
acts whose music were shared the most on the Gnutella
network. "The idea was to give artists a  gauge of how
popular their music was, down to the individual tracks,"
says Goddard. "Demographics like that can be  very useful
for artists and labels to get a feel for what their
listeners like." Shortly after creating this program,
Goddard re-used its code base for PeerCast. What began as a
list-compiler  application quickly evolved into a totally
different one which could stream static media files, like
MP3s, on a  peer-to-peer network. It wasn't an easy
evolution. The toughest challenge for Goddard and his two
anonymous partners  was coding the servants that talk
Gnutella.

"P2P is very hard to do right because packets have to be
checked and routed correctly. Connections have to be 
maintained and dropped appropriately. Network overhead has
to be minimal," explains Goddard. "The client also has  to
work multi-threaded, of course, and it can't use too much
CPU or memory because people will be running it in the 
background while doing other things."

Streamer, on the other hand, was not as difficult to create
partly because its underlying workings are not as 
sophisticated as PeerCast's. Streamer uses the standard C
networking functions to open ports, and to send and  receive
blocks of data. McLeod started developing Streamer in early
2001, and the original version of it took him just a  week
to put together. He released the program to the public in an
unfinished state, but public demand for it suddenly  took
off. Since then, he has been working to improve it.

"The biggest technical challenge was actually in designing
the system so it does what is wanted and works properly.
All  that happens in my head and lots of bits of paper,"
says McLeod. "The actual implementation of it is not so
difficult  once I have thought of a way to do something." 

While Goddard says that he and his team have ironed out most
of the bugs from PeerCast, issues remain with  firewalled
users not being able to connect to listeners who are behind
other firewalls. Thus, it definitely helps to have  lots of
bandwidth to serve more than just one listener directly.

Goddard describes what they plan to do to correct this:
"We're looking into setting up nodes on the networks to
function  like Gnet super-nodes and to also provide 'boosts'
to the network for users who are on slow connections or
behind  firewalls."

For Streamer, its significant bug is that it doesn't perform
too well when set to broadcast at a high bitrate. 24Kbps is 
the maximum advised for dial-up modem listeners at the
moment. Since the program is still in beta, it sometimes
does  odd things unexpectedly: A station might send audio
data with no sound, or broadcasts that are sped-up making a 
singer sound like a "chipmunk." The program has not been
heavily tested with several users listening to a broadcast, 
and McLeod admits that additional problems will probably
crop up when it is.

McLeod has been working on fixes to improve the streaming
performance of his program. A forthcoming version of 
Streamer will upgrade its streaming protocol from a "tree"
system to something more like a "mesh" (the technique that 
PeerCast and the latest P2P clients use). This means there
will be alternate broadcast signal paths available when one 
path fails. This mesh will be able to shift its links around
dynamically in order to optimize the network and to
gradually  migrate high-bandwidth hosts to the center.
Fractional signal feeds,where only a percentage of the
stream is sent by  some hosts, will also be added to take
advantage of the low upload bandwidth of dial-up modems and
to allow these  modems to receive higher bitrate streams.

Goddard and his associates will add several new features to
upcoming versions of PeerCast. The most notable  include: A
"tip jar" payment scheme so that listeners can give artists
money; a Winamp plug-in which will let users put  up a
PeerCast channel on Winamp; a screensaver which can be set
to share bandwidth with other PeerCast users; a  Mac version
of PeerCast; and, what's sure to give Hollywood studio and
TV network executives concern, the streaming  of video.

Most importantly, the PeerCast developers are researching
the feasibility of using multiple audio streams which would 
broadcast simultaneously in order to increase sound quality.
"For instance, having four 32K streams combined to make  one
128K stream, but still allowing the four streams to be
listen-able by themselves, maybe by encoding every other 
frequency," explains Goddard.

For future versions of Streamer, McLeod plans to add Ogg
Vorbis support; public key encryption for the purpose of 
broadcaster authentication; the ability to broadcast streams
anonymously; and support for including non-audio content 
mixed into the broadcast stream, such as a station ID logo,
an ad banner, or a Web page.

The Next Advancement in Music Distribution Technology--or
Radio Piracy? Thanks to the work that McLeod and Goddard are
doing, the path has been paved for a new Internet broadcast 
medium. A decline in financial means for Internet radio to
operate could spur further technological advances and 
interest in P2P streaming audio and, inevitably, video. The
result could be numerous pirate radio and TV stations on 
P2P networks in the near future.

Of course, McLeod and Goddard are well aware of this
scenario, yet neither is daunted by the potential wrath of
the  music industry, particularly by the major U.S. labels.
Asked what he thinks about the looming controversies
surrounding  online music distribution, McLeod feels he is
fighting against what he fears could lead to worse things.
"Is the U.S.  going to end up with a filtered Internet at
the request of the media conglomerates, with 'police-ware'
installed on all PCs  by law, filtering not unlike the great
firewall of China, 'police-ware' like a Big Brother Commie
state would use?"

For the PeerCast team, they see their goal as advancing the
technology of online music distribution, in lieu of the
music  industry's reluctance to do so. "We're based in
Japan. The Japanese tend to embrace new technology rather
than  hiding from it like the music and movie conglomerates
have done in the West," says Goddard. "We have to find a 
better way to publish music. At the moment the people who
control that appear to have no incentive to move forward. 
So if they can't, then the rest of us are going to have to
do it for them."

Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed
frequently to O'Reilly Network and written for Salon.com,
Playboy.com, and Wired, among others.