Podcasting and Torrents

[owyn]

The download bandwidth problems over the last week made me look into podcasting and torrents. The highest profile problems were the meltdown at Slashdot Review and the problems with the Podshow Strategy cast.

Andrew @ Slashdot is using torrents for his new feed on his new host. Dave @ Evil Genius Chronicles has been using torrents as his default feed for some time. Other podcasters are offering torrent links to individual episodes but Dave and Andrew are the only two that I am aware of that are offering torrent feeds that work. Well, Andrew is having some teething pains but by the time you are reading this they shoule be very close to over.

The good news is that I have been able to subscribe to their feeds cleanly from iPodder using the latest stable release on WXP and the beta 2.0rc3 on Linux. Even better, I was able to do this both with and WITHOUT port forwarding on 6881. It WORKS behind firewalls. Slowly. But it works.

The bad news is that the iPodder current implementation is a pure leech. ie. It can successfully download enclosures but it does not share anything back.

I had not used torrents before because I am basically paranoid. Well, not exactly, you are not really paranoid if people really are out to get you. I keep my network locked down with both hardware NAT and software firewalls.

To do more extensive testing of torrents and podcasting I:
1)Hardened the security on a Mandriva 10.1 Linux system
2)Port forwarded 6881 to that system
3)Decided on Azureus as my bitttorrent client/server. It has the best feature set and, with the 2.3.0 release, even better scalability. It is also available on all the major platforms.
4)Opened an account on Prodigem

The good news is that I was able to add myself in as an additional seed for specific torrents. The bad news is that is not, yet, an automatic process.

I also have problems with Prodigem. There torrent distribution works, and works well, but is proprietary. The torrents payload is a directory containing the mp3 file for an episode. The directory is not a playable entity. Or at least it is not the way I have my systems configured. Could be a my bad.

Still researching and learning.

Opening this topic up for discussion here.

Interested in:
- Are there other podcasts offering working torrent FEEDS?
- Does iPodder torrent support work on the Mac? I don't use Macs.
- What additional clients work out of the box? Specically, which podcatching clients can handle the default EGC feed? I am using that as the gold standard in torrent feeds.

[alissa]

this is probably a dumb question, but wtf is a torrent feed?

[owyn]

Originally Posted by alissa

this is probably a dumb question, but wtf is a torrent feed?

From WikiPedia BitTorrent

A torrent feed is a RSS feed whose enclosures are pointers to torrent files which themselves describe payload files.

eg. the torrent file "filename.mp3.torrent" would normally have a payload of "filename.mp3", ie. the enclosure in a direct mp3 RSS feed.

The following snippet from EGC demonstrates this.

<rss xmlns:egc="http://www.wgbh.org/rss" version="2.0">
	<egc:annotation>This is a data file meant to be read by an RSS reader. </egc:annotation>


  <channel>
    <title>Evil Genius Chronicles</title>
    <link>http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi</link>

    <description>A journal of geekery, music and joy</description>
    <language>en</language>
    <managingEditor>2rcbxmdv802@sneakemail.com</managingEditor>
    <lastBuildDate>Thu,  5 May 2005 12:36:53 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<item>
	<title>Bittorrent Test File</title>
	<link>http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/audio/egc-bittorrent-test.mp3.torrent</link>

	<description>Test file to verify Bittorrent works for the iPodder* client</description>
	<pubDate>Mon, 15 Nov 2004 05:22:00 -0500</pubDate>
	<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/audio/egc-bittorrent-test.mp3.torrent</guid>
	<author>Dave Slusher 2rcbxmdv802@sneakemail.com </author>
        <enclosure url="http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/audio/egc-bittorrent-test.mp3.torrent" length="617" type="audio/mpeg"/>
</item>

[gozar]

I've noticed that Leo Laporte uses Coral Cache. Has anyone else gone this route? How well does it work.

[owyn]

I took a look at Coral Cache and then checked Laporte's feed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/kfi

When I did a view source I could not see the Coral suffix on the enclosures.

Using Coral

Taking advantage of Coral CDN is simple. Just append

.nyud.net:8090

to the hostname of any URL,

    <item>
      <title>KFI Tech Guy Sunday April 24,</title>
      <link>http://feeds.feedburner.com/kfi?m=1</link>
      <description>KFI Tech Guy Sunday April 24, - KFI April 2005 - Leo Laporte</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 11:00:00 -0500</pubDate>

      <enclosure url="http://leoville.tv/airchecks/20050424.mp3" length="38422405" type="audio/mpeg" />
      <feedburner:origLink>http://leoville.tv/airchecks/20050424.mp3</feedburner:origLink>
    </item>

[Dave]

I don't know of any iPodder-like programs that offer torrent support for podcasts. Videora offers RSS+torrent support, but it's geared toward video. The only RSS+torrent feed I'm using now is one I'm using through Mozilla T-bird, and while it's easy enough to play with, it's not quite automatic as iPodder. (And it gets me my Doctor Who fix, so I'm not complaining...)

As far as setting up enclosures on your own server... well, I'm just another LibSyn user, so I doubt I could be much help there.

-Dave

[lerhaupt]

Originally Posted by owyn

I also have problems with Prodigem. There torrent distribution works, and works well, but is proprietary. The torrents payload is a directory containing the mp3 file for an episode. The directory is not a playable entity. Or at least it is not the way I have my systems configured. Could be a my bad.

Owyn - thanks for emailing me so I could join in this thread. Prodigem does not create proprietary torrents. Torernts by spec can either be a single file or a directory with multiple files in that directory. Prodigem uses the latter. The problem is that the various ipodder-type programs out there don't know what to do with these directories. I have attempted to contact the guys who write their software, but haven't gotten a response. The bottom line is that all the information necessary to find the mp3 file is actually in human-readable form in the .torrent file that you get from Prodigem. This means that ipodder just needs a little more smarts and it would be able to automatically pull it from the torrent payload and transfer it onto your ipod. Maybe we can get their developers to notice this request so we can get ths fixed?

Gary

[owyn]

Gary. Thanks for replying.

Proprietary was a bad choice of words. Different would have been better.

I will raise an enhancment request at Lemon Support. And look into the code as well.

I understand why you package by folder at your end. It would be usefull however if you could expose a torrent for the files in addition to the folder. If you did that you would work with iPodder and any other client which supports Torrent and queing to Players.

This would also make the download directory contents the same for .torrent and direct .mp3 feeds.

[lerhaupt]

There are a number of reasons why I don't use single file torrents. The most important of these is that I want a LICENSE.txt file to travel with all torrents which go out and this automatically forces me to use a directory. Lemon et all should be able to handle this anyway since the formatting of a .torrent file is b-encoded, and this open format specifies the names of all files located within the torrent and the directory name that the torrent will save its content to. They just need a little extra logic to look in subdirs.

Gary

[owyn]

I just checked Slashdot's feed.

<item>
<title>SDR2005-05-04 Slashdot Review</title>
-
	<link>
http://downloadradio.org/shows/SDR2005-05-04.mp3.torrent
</link>
<enclosure url="http://downloadradio.org/shows/SDR2005-05-04.mp3.torrent" length="66963" type="application/x-bittorrent"/>
</item>

http://downloadradio.org/ is definitely Podcast and Torrent friendly.