<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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+ <item>
+ <title>Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A few days ago, a new major version of
+<a href="https://www.videolan.org/">VLC</a> was announced, and I
+decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
+<a href="http://bittorrent.org/">bittorrent</a> and
+<a href="https://webtorrent.io">webtorrent</a>. Bittorrent is one of
+the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
+Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
+<a href="https://webrtc.org">WebRTC</a> as its transport channel,
+allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
+The network protocols are not identical, so a client supporting one of
+them can not talk to a client supporting the other. I was a bit
+surprised with what I discovered. Looking at
+<a href="https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html">the release
+notes</a> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
+the web. I found several news articles from 2013, most of them
+tracing the news from Torrentfreak
+("<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-130211/">Open
+Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support</a>"), about a
+initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
+support. To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
+over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
+feature request tickets tracking such feature. I got an answer from
+lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
+but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was. So I searched a bit
+more, and came across an independent
+<a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">VLC plugin to add
+bittorrent support</a>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in 2016/2017.
+Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
+about.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
+the git repository, with some modifications. After installing this
+package, I could stream videos from
+<a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a> using VLC
+commands like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
+Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
+time tracking down another source, I have not tested it. It can take
+quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
+what is going on from VLC. It took 10-20 seconds when I measured it.
+Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
+play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line. I
+have no idea why.</p>
+
+<p>I have created a <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/890360">request for
+a new package in Debian (RFP)</a> and
+<a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/1">asked if
+the upstream author is willing to help make this happen</a>. Now we
+wait to see what come out of this. I do not want to maintain a
+package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
+maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this. But I
+really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
+still maintaining the source. If you want to help, please update the
+RFP request or the upstream issue.</p>
+
+<p>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html</link>
Caminandes example above</a>, where there are three movies but only
one Wikidata entry).</p>
-<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sat, 18 Nov 2017 21:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">automatically
-check the copyright status of IMDB entries</a>, and try to count the
-number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
-Internet. I have continued to look for good data sources, and
-identified a few more. The code used to extract information from
-various data sources is available in
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
-git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
-
-<p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain
-better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
-histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
-year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
-graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect
-World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
-around 2010?</p>
-
-<p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
-
-<p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
-the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics
-reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
-
-<pre>
- 249 entries ( 6 unique) with and 288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
- 2301 entries ( 540 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
- 830 entries ( 29 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
- 2109 entries ( 377 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
- 291 entries ( 122 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
- 144 entries ( 135 unique) with and 0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
- 350 entries ( 1 unique) with and 801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
- 4 entries ( 0 unique) with and 124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
- 698 entries ( 119 unique) with and 118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
- 8 entries ( 8 unique) with and 196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
- 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
-</pre>
-
-<p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
-data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
-listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
-movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I've seen examples of all these
-situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based
-on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
-are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
-
-<p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
-if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have
-tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
-are interested in doing this, without any replies so far. Perhaps you
-can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
-Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
-convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
-
-<p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
-movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page
-exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
-script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
-pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
-
<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
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