Use A Custom Miro For Church Videos and Conference

Ok, there was already a bit of BitTorrent talk here: http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=562

In it I mentioned the idea of using Miro, having just finished watching Conference I want to expand on it.

In my city in Alberta, we're fortunate enough to have conference viewable on cable TV. Problem is that the Saturday afternoon session was pre-empted by a local football game and I had to fire up the laptop to watch.

The Windows Media feed would not even come up and the Move Networks feed was 32k/s, like watching old seminary slide shows. It paused so much that we finished watching conference at 4:30, 30 minutes after it had actually ended.

Enter Miro: http://www.getmiro.com/

Miro is an Open Source video distribution platform. It combines a media player with a video catalog and a BitTorrent client, and it is available on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Look at the demo video at http://www.getmiro.com/screencasts/ and imagine with me...

You customize Miro, create a channel for the current conference session. Someone runs a box with a realtime h.264 encoder. You can get a 20 minute conference talk into about 3-4 megs, call it 10 for fullscreen broadcast quality.

You push these out as soon as a given talk finishes and add them to the channel list. Within minutes the video will spread out among members, with so many pulling the talk the bandwidth for members to grab the talk will allow them to get it within minutes. The church's bandwidth cost will be low because they only seed it to the first 50-100 users, then it spreads via bittorrent. The members can get broadcast quality video of conference and only be one or two talks back. Miro could be configured to do a more regular pull on the live conference session and automatically play each entry in the queue as they download.

When not being used for conference, the system could still be an on-demand catalog of church videos and other talks in regional conferences and whatnot.

Imagine being able to search through the entire catalog of church videos and pull them on demand? You could even add functionality to automate the burning of a church video to DVD so people could watch them easily on their TVs.

Something like this would be really easy to do since the core work is already done by the Miro team, it would just be a matter of maintaining a branch.

Is there a way we could even get it semi-live. As you noticed with Move Networks (the reason for the slow speed I believe was the massive numbers of connections everyone was making to it) it got behind which could be annoying for people who switch medias often (watching at home, get it car to drive to SLC for second session listen on radio) and they'd miss about 15-30 mins of conference). If realtime was too difficult then maybe even 3 min delay which at least is still in the same talk.

You could incorporate something like ESM from Carnegie Mellon Uni, which is a peer to peer streaming system.

The nice part of the system is that the viewer source is Open and available under a BSD license, and the viewer is the same as that in Miro, so one could easily hook ESM into Miro:

http://esm.cs.cmu.edu/

I think the benefit of the straight Miro solution is the quality of the video and lack of skipping, but ESM would augment to allow for realtime streaming of Conference without the huge bandwidth hit to the church without having to wait for the individual talk recording to finish downloading. One could use the two together to watch in realtime while downloading a video archive on a per-talk basis for later viewing.

This would be a really good idea, especially since as more people join on to watch conference the better the quality and hopefully no bandwidth crunch (unless everyone on your block is on cable and so you only have 28.8 Kb connection anyway).

This is an interesting idea. Currently if the Church holds the copyright of the material and does not grant individuals the right to redistribute the material, how does that play in with Bittorrent? Technically people are redistributing it with Bittorrent, but not in any kind of malicious way.

Tom

tomw wrote:Technically people are redistributing it with Bittorrent, but not in any kind of malicious way.

I don't know the legal answer to this question, but there are some good examples from commercial content owners using bittorrent to distribute content.

For example, Joost is based on a P2P distribution method, but CBS and other content owners are allowing their content to be distributed through the system. BitTorrent DNA has been in the news of late with a similar system that they are marketing to content owners.

I don't know if the Church would actually have to change their licensing on content or if it would be adequate to maintain control of the distribution process, even though users would be shouldering some of the bandwidth load.

I think the key here is Unauthorized Redistribution. As copyright holder the church has the right to name its terms, including allowing for distribution to its members through any channel it sees fit.

It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a license that restricts usage to personal viewing with a ban on unauthorized public performance or modification.

There are technological ways to restrict how the content is used such as is done with commercial users of BitTorrent but I don't think the church needs to go down the road of DRM.

Also I think the church is worried more about modification of the video then the actual distribution itself. (I maybe wrong too) But the way I see it is that the church is distributing it (since each client must connect to the server to see who else they can download it from) through the resources of other users (similar to when some buys a DVD, the church distributes by the media was created by a third party).

thedqs wrote:Also I think the church is worried more about modification of the video then the actual distribution itself.

I hadn't thought of that, but how secure is the medium from tampering? Would it be possible to insert a segment from some other video into the data stream by spoofing the desired data? Granted, I don't think it's happened so far, but then that's not to say it won't given the right motivation. I don't see connecting to church servers for information from where to download as providing protection from that.

BitTorrent prevents corruption or injection of data from a malicious third party. Because the download list would be officially maintained the risk of getting malicious material through the official client would be minimized or even eliminated.

RussellHltn wrote:I hadn't thought of that, but how secure is the medium from tampering? Would it be possible to insert a segment from some other video into the data stream by spoofing the desired data? Granted, I don't think it's happened so far, but then that's not to say it won't given the right motivation. I don't see connecting to church servers for information from where to download as providing protection from that.

Also a MD5 hash of the segments would be hard to spoof due to a few mathematical laws surrounding hashing. Anyway the church servers could provide the list and the hashs to the client and if the client got a bad segment it would then select another server to download from.

tomw wrote:This is an interesting idea. Currently if the Church holds the copyright of the material and does not grant individuals the right to redistribute the material, how does that play in with Bittorrent? Technically people are redistributing it with Bittorrent, but not in any kind of malicious way.

Tom

I spoke with our legal department and they indicated that they don't see legal problem if they chose to distribute the content via bittorrent. That is not saying that they will, only that they could if they wanted.

Also, people referred me to http://www.byu.tv where you can get the sessions of general conference as well as other church related multi-media. The nice thing about this site is that it uses a cool technology from a company locally here called "Move Networks". The player (unfortunately only available for Windows and Mac) does an excellent job at adjusting to the bandwidth and preserves audio over video. So if your bandwidth is poor, you will hear the audio flawlessly while the video may chuck or pixelate at times.

Tom

The move player is not bad but here's the thing:

Move Network: As more people try to get the content, everyone's connection becomes slower as people compete for the limited bandwidth.

Bittorrent: As more people try to get the content, aggregate bandwidth increases because each time a member downloads a chunk of the content, they become a source for the chunk. This means that if you were distributing conference through this kind of technology people could be grabbing sessions at the maximum speed of their connection. Since they would be downloading fixed videos, they would be able to get broadcast quality video.

Another factor is that byu.tv only shows you the day's video, with Miro we could create a persistent, categorized and tagged catalog of media that members could browse and download on demand.

My experience with Move Networks is that during a high demand showing (BYU devotional, General Conference, etc) the lag gets so bad that it throws you one or two hours behind schedule even for audio only.

thedqs wrote:My experience with Move Networks is that during a high demand showing (BYU devotional, General Conference, etc) the lag gets so bad that it throws you one or two hours behind schedule even for audio only.

Good feedback, I'll pass it along.

Tom

When the Saturday morning session ended I turned on Move networks because the afternoon session was not being shown by my cable provider.

At 12:10 the move feed was 500K/s and looked broadcast quality.

At 1:50 the move feed was 32K/s and looked like an old Seminary filmstrip with about one video frame every 3 seconds. Audio paused a lot. When we finally switched to a alternate feed (won't tell which, muahaha) we discovered that we were two full talks behind the live conference.

Again, with streaming video through bittorrent or the CMU technology we'd have the opposite effect, the individual bandwidth would increase as there were more members streaming, not decrease. The church's bandwidth consumption would likely go *down* since they would only feed the first layer of streamers, who would feed the next and the next until all members were serving conference to eachother.

Think of it like the law of consecration for bandwidth

I wouldn't mind devoting bandwidth to help spread conference. Personally I think that this would be a great solution, especially since even church servers could return to sending video out instead of just audio. (Audio was done because of the bandwidth demand on church servers)

Then again, maybe we just need to wait another year or so and the technology will be completely ready for streaming with P2P. China's got a P2P network that was "50% faster than bittorrent"

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/16/50 ... nt-i-want/

I'd be another that'd be happy to consecrate my bandwidth to building up the kingdom.... and it'd be nice if people were encouraged to continue sharing for a week or so, as out here in NZ we have to watch it a week later because our timezone is 18 hours ahead of the US.

Actually the link claims it is 50 times faster, but I'd take it with a grain of salt. That said, I can currently hit 900K/s on a bittorrent of Linux when the latest version is first released and everyone is pulling it.

As for the part about still sharing in a week, Miro by default holds and continues sharing downloaded video content for a week after the user watches it unless they explicitly mark it to be kept permanently. This of course means that if members were pulling conference using queues of single talk videos through Miro, they would be sharing those for at least a week, allowing any member in the network to get the videos at a decent speed up to a week after conference.

And of course, this means a lot less bandwidth usage for the church to publish the video archives. I just downloaded one session in full and it was 900 megs, which really adds up if the archives are a popular service. Much better to know that only a few chunks come from the church's bandwidth and the rest is shared out by members who are also downloading.

wow! 900mb per session... thats definitely going to add up!

It'd be interesting to know how many people watched the last conference via Move Networks.

900 MB for a single session is about right. 5 sessions = 4.5 GB which is a DVDs worth and that is what conference is put on.

I did watch one session on Move Network (Sunday Morning) but just for the picture of the speaker and listened to audio on the radio.

Ok I'm bringing this back to life because I really want to see this thing exist.

The question is: how do I get permission to push content onto this system if I build it externally? Who do you ask for permission to share conference videos via P2P?

I'd start with contacting the intellectual property office of the Church or possibly curriculum.

Tom