BitTorrent is a P2P (Wikipedia : Peer-to-peer) tool tuned for sharing large files. You start a "torrent" by registering a file on your computer with a "tracker". The tracker coordinates people who are downloading the file but does not actually host the file. The file is hosted on the computers of the peers and people download it from each other. People who have the complete file "seed" the torrent and people can download the file from numerous peers at the same time. Therefore, it makes sense to try to download files via BitTorrent when everyone else is downloading the same file. This seems particularly good for things like video blogging where it is likely that people will be synchronized in their downloading.
As a courtesy, after you've downloaded a file, keep it online so it can seed others who want to download the file.
We're using BNBT - A C++ BitTorrent Tracker to run our tracker. For some reason it sometimes takes 15-30 min for torrents to start downloading. Does anyone know why this might be? -- Joi Ito
Recently, many torrents are starting much faster. Does the quality and the number of seeds affect how quickly torrents peer and start going? -- Joi Ito
Running a seeding client on the server seemed like a good idea, but didn't noticeably speed things up at all. -- Jim O'Connell
If someone who has experience running a tracker wants to work with me on setting up and maintaining a tracker focused on Creative Commons licensed video, I'd really appreciate the help... -- Joi Ito
Done! Connect to p2p.questar.it. Everybody can download, registered VIP users can upload, Joi has an Admin account. The site uses the php based TorrentTracker code, currently in beta. Let me know if it works ok for all of you. -- David Orban
One thing I have considered as an application is using BitTorrent to distribute encrypted, DRM-protected content. The idea would be to use P2P to share the distribution of very large rights-managed files which a lot of people would want to download within a very short space of time. The benefit for media companies in terms of distribution speed and cost would be enormous. I have actually come up with a cryptographic scheme to facilitate this in my copious spare moments. -- Antoin O Lachtnain
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