Bywifi Video Accelerator

[Zero3K]

Bywifi (Video Streaming Downloader) is a free program for downloading, transcoding and P2P accelerating video streaming. It supports downloading, transcoding and P2P accelerating videos from all video websites, such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, etc. Lots of advanced network technologies like P2SP (peer-to-server-and-peer), multiple tasks, web sensitive, intelligence caching are used in the software. The bitrate of video streaming is 3-5 times faster with bywifi than without it. Moreover, it can transcode videos into mobile formats for mobile phones and PDA.
The download url is http://www.bywifi.co...oad/bywifi_setup.exe

Software Features
1. P2P Accelerate Video Streaming:With P2SP (peer-to-server-and-peer), it speeds up downloading of video streaming. Its better algorithms have accelerated video downloading by more than 3--5 times.
2. Downloading Video: With automatically flash stream detection, video contents on many websites can be downloaded easily and free. The feature supports IE browser.
3. Transcoding Video: Videos can be transcoded into many formats supporting any mobile phones and PDAs, such as Nokia, iPhone, SamSung, iPad, iPod, and PSP.
4. Resume Video Automatically: For the same video, it does not need to buffer again when you close the Web Browser.
5. Search Hot Video: You can search video with bywifi. It is easy for u to watch the new, hot and cool video.
6. The software supports Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista.

[BigJim]

I shall be most interested to hear of anyone's experience or views on this software. Thanks.   

[Jimdoria]

This looks really interesting, but it sets off some red lights on my spyware warning system.

They're establishing their own P2P network, used only by other users of the software? It's going to take a while for that network to grow until there's any benefit for most users, I'd think. Is it using bittorrent, gnutella, or some proprietary protocol?

Also, how are they setting up this network? What data is being communicated over it? Is there a central server orchestrating connections, and possibly keeping a list of what files I've downloaded? How much of my bandwidth will be used for sharing?

I'd want to know a little more about how this thing works before I'd let it loose on my hard drive, as good as it sounds.

[Zero3K]

Actually, its P2P network is very simple. It detects if you're running Bywifi on another computer and uses its connection (if you are running Bywifi on it) to speed up the download of the video.

[Jimdoria]

So the benefit is only on my own network? It doesn't use anyone else's bandwidth?

I can't see how this scheme would confer any real benefit. The bottleneck in most home networks is the pipe to the ISP. Max out your cable or DSL bandwidth, and it doesn't matter how many machines you've got trying to pull down a stream - only so many bits are going to get through at a time.

No "algorithm" behind the bottleneck is going to be able to alter this equation. Now, if software outside your network were re-compressing and re-streaming, that might help. The biggest benefit I could see would be that multiple peers serving up a stream from different locations would effectively avoid any upstream bottlenecks between you and the video site - swamped servers, a downed router, etc.

I'd be very suspicious about the effectiveness of recompression, though. Video streams are already highly compressed, using asymetrical compression technology that applies the best compression possible for the given content. Any re-compression would have to be done on-the-fly, using a more generic, real-time algorithm. If you saw any benefit at all, it might be 10%-15% - not 300% - 500%.

Compression and streaming are also CPU intensive. I doubt you could run this in the background without seeing a substantial performance hit, provided it's doing what it claims.

This strikes me as very similar to those "RAM doubler" programs that used to be around. Using compression on data in RAM sounded plausible enough to people who didn't really understand the technical issues, but it proved to be nothing but snake oil. I wouldn't be surprised if this was of the same ilk. Improving video downloads is a problem lots of people would like to see solved, but that doesn't mean that a cheap, easy solution to the problem really exists.

[Zero3K]

Well, it also uses multiple connections for accelerating a video.

[Jimdoria]

And why is this better, exactly?

If I have 4 connections each running at 200Kbps or 1 connection running at 800Kbps, am I gaining anything? Considering that each connection probably includes some overhead for managing the connection that takes away bandwidth which could be used for actual content, I may actually be worse off with multiple connections!

Maybe my assumptions about the problem are wrong? I'm not trying to be stubborn, I really would like to understand what the benefit is of this system. So far I'm just not getting it.