Interesting...50x Faster Than BitTorrent

[Laughing Man]

http://www.techcrunc...n-bittorrent-i-want/

Though this is partially because of China investing tons of money into developing an IT infrastructure.

[justice]

call my sceptic, but if you read the article it proves the claim 50x faster by saying he could start watching the DVD season episode after only 3 minutes, which reads to me like it just allows to 'watch as you download', not that the whole downloading process is 50x faster. Steam does this for games for example.

[Renegade]

Excuse me as *coughbullshitcough* I clear my *ahembullshitahem* throat.

50x is not possible. He's claiming 50x faster than Bittorrent at DVD quality. Not possible through a protocol.

Assume that you've got connection and bandwidth parity - remember, we're talking about the protocol here - for whatever he's talking about (Blin) and for BT. He is then saying that the bittorrent protocol adds in overhead that slows it down by 50x, comparatively. That's total BS.

You can't factor data compression in (as that doesn't talk about the protocol) because it's already video and audio compressed (if AC3 or DTS and not LPCM). Data compression doesn't significantly reduce the size of compressed audio or video in most cases. So data compression is out even if someone wants to try to factor it in - it's irrelevant. Remember... DVD quality... (Lossey compression degrades quality.)

What's left? Overhead? Nothing is that bad. You would have to TRY to make the protocol as horrible as possible. Only government is capable of doing something that badly.

The ONLY thing that makes real sense is that in China fewer people use BT while many use the other program (Blin). More clients means more places to download from. THAT can result in faster speeds like 50x, but not a protocol.

Here's some simple math:

1 DVD = about 4GB (4,294,967,296 bytes)
Running time = about 2 hours
Download speed is then 596,523 bytes per second

Which is entirely believable (I get MSDN downloads at much faster speed than that), but it also says that BT speeds are then 11,930 bytes per second (as it's 50x slower), which is true in some cases, but it's not hard to get a few hundred thousand bytes per second with BT.

That the protocol is 50x faster is simply false.

That the Blin P2P network is much larger than the BT network in China is entirely believable. Those are VERY different things.

[f0dder]

The bittorrent protocol seems efficient enough to me - I can, not just theoretically, grab a DVD image in ~45 minutes with my 20mbit downstream. It all has to do with how well a thing is seeded. It's a real shame that things like the university/whatever-hosted linux images don't make better use of torrents - for that kind of stuff, I can usually grab the files faster by using a download manager and getting via http or ftp.

Bittorrent also seems to scale quite well even with high-speed lines...

[Lashiec]

Debunked . Read the comments to find if it's possible to get amazing speeds in China using BitTorrent as well.

The article is so stupid I wanna barf. Simply, it gets everything wrong. Well, hello, it's Tech Crunch, masters of hype, and it seems they can't do a simple research on the original article, not understand some technology basics. And never heard of such amazing program before, this stinks of blatant marketing. Well done, Arrington and company...

Where do I start... first, there's no proof, only talk, if Blin is so impressive, I want to see it live, not hear some guys praising it. Second, god dammit, ask the first teenager in the street and they'll tell you where you can do the same provided you have a fast enough connection. Third, how come do you claim Blin faster than BitTorrent? Did you try it with Internet2 or something? Did you do a true test? As f0dder says, a torrent with enough seeds will go fast as hell, maxing out your connection, and we are forgetting about physical bottlenecks, you see, hard disks have a max speed, and you can't go faster than that.

TechCrunch, really, DO your research before posting stupid things, and do not include unnecessary paragraphs like the last one, which only serves for a fight between readers in the comments, which is totally out of the question. But to defend Tech Crunch, it should be said that, being a blog that focus on startups, it's understandable, but not acceptable.

[f0dder]

Well, I can think of some protocol reasons why something might be smarter than torrents - with torrent clients, you receive your chinks in more or less arbitrary order. If you want to watch stuff as-you-download, you need a more ordered stream.

But hey, I guess that should be possible to do with the BitTorrent protocol as well, especially if you have a legit content-serving network where you will always have a bunch of servers with the full files, unlike how... "other kinds" of torrents... are distributed.

Speaking of legit content delivery, I wonder wtf valve/steam doesn't use a distributed model. Okay, might not be possible to do it securely using end-user p2p (afaik the big .gcf files with game content are encrypted per-user), but they could at least distribute the workload between their content servers. When I purchased the Orange Pack, I downloaded it at <50kb/s most of the time. It would probably have been faster to get the game files pirated

[Laughing Man]

Yeah I did notice it was probably due to the networking in China. But at the same time it's also interesting because since patents and copyright infringements aren't as enforced in China it's interesting to see these things pop up. Makes you wonder what may be possible if copyrights/patents weren't so messed up in the US.

(note I do think that copyrights have a purpose but the amount of time they last is absurd). For copyright reform I'd just want them to reduce the amount of time you could hold a copyright.