SwarmTv

Welcome to SwarmTv

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:00:00 +0100

What is SwarmTV

The current television-broadcasting system has certain disadvantages. End-users have virtually no control over the content they want to view. Broadcasters determine how and when the media is broadcasted. We suggests a radical change of the system end-users use to view television. By using our technologies we are able to give users more control and allow them to decide when and what they want to watch.
With the rise of broadband Internet in our homes and the growth of digital High Definition video content, it would be preferable to combine these technologies and create a system that is easy to use for the end-user. Now the user can download High Definition (HD) content and store it for playback when the user wants it. We believe that distributing television series over the Internet using distributed technologies will expand greatly in the upcoming years.
The SwarmTv product will be based around 3 integral parts, namely a client application, a production application and applications for the servers.

Client application for viewing content.
Producer application.
Server Applications.

The client software will enable the end-user to search for media, (un)subscribe to Virtual Channels(VC) and view their requested media. A Virtual Channel is a channel accessible through the Internet, hosting content that is related to the content provider or a specific topic. The production application will make it possible for content providers to easily create and share their content with the SwarmTv system. With minimal effort the commercial content providers can reach a large audience other than those using the traditional broadcast channels. Their (copyrighted) media will be protected by a (optionally) Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. Our servers will provide the indexing of the different Virtual Channels and receive and host copies of the media to the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network.

Our goal is to make software that will allow easy access to digital media on the Internet. Our service is basically an index of all available media on the SwarmTv system, through which the end-user can easily browse. All media will be hosted by so-called "Virtual Channels" to which the end-user can subscribe. Subscription enables features such as notification of the latest episode of the user's favorite content, and automatic downloads. This service is from the end-user's point of view. For the producers, on the other hand, our services provide the means of reaching a large audience with a minimal amount of effort.

The software will be based on the following open-source standards:
RSS 2, BitTorrent,MPEG-4 H.264 codec and will be written in C++

A graphical example of the network setup: SwarmTv network.
Extra reading for possible interfaces: SwarmTv End User experience and SwarmTv Web interface.
The main developers are:
Ranzbak - Paul Honig
the_jinX - Anne-Jan Brouwer
Wally4u - Erick van Rijk

SwarmTv Qt GUI

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:04:02 +0200

Ranzbak has been playing with Qt Designer and made a frontend that actually works.
Atleast, it links with libSwarmTv and does some initialisation.

Be sure to check it out:

svn co https://svn.etv.cx/svn/SwarmTvQtGui

Or just take a look at the code.

Vacation

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:50:58 +0200

After a warm and then rainy summer The_Jinx, Wally4u and I are back from our vacations. This means work on swarmtv will resume this week, and the first meeting to determine the next development goals will be soon.
Furthermore, the designs for a Qt based gui are in the making, the project for now is called SwarmTvFE (front end). When there is an agreement on the layout of the gui, implementation will commence.

SwarmTv alpha

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:31:45 +0200

Today SwarmTv has become alpha.
That means it does all the things it should..minimally ;)

It fetches rss and can download the latest torrents.
These are stored in a Download folder (set by the client).

Read the README for information or start SwarmTv without arguements for info.

We are allready working hard for our next milestone, a lib with seperate (Graphical) frontend.
Keep an eye out on the TODO.

Comments are more then welcome, but developers are even more welcome.
We need more hands on this project to keep the speed of development up.You can download SwarmTv alpha now.

Dependencies

pkgconfig	http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/	>= 0.9.0
glibmm	http://www.gtkmm.org/	>= 2.4.0
libxml++	http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/	>= 2.10.0
libsigc++	http://libsigc.sourceforge.net/	>= 2.0.0
cURL	http://curl.haxx.se/	>= 7.12.0
PCRE	http://www.pcre.org/	>= 6.4
libtorrent	http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/	>= 0.10.0

Slackware users can get the latest Slackpackages of the dependencies and even an autogenerated SwarmTv package from the_JinX's site.

Nearing Alpha

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 06:08:35 +0200

SwarmTv is allmost Alpha..

Not there yet, but it can in ideal circumstances with the right moon and all that download files with bittorrent..
Ranzbak, Wally4u and I will have a meeting soon to set up a preliminary roadmap for SwarmTv beta..

SwarmTv 0.0.1 pre alpha

USAGE  : ./SwarmTv [-a url] [-c url] [-d] [-[eE] url] [-l] [-L]
                   [-n nr] [-r url] [-[i][sS] query] [-[tT] days] [-u]
 -a: add rss (requires url)
 -c: show content of channel (requires url)
 -d: download
 -e: enable auto download (requires url)
 -E: disable auto download (requires url)
 -i: make search case insensitive (use before -s or -S)
 -l: list channels
 -L: list all
 -n: number of concurrent torrent downloads (use before -d)
 -r: remove rss (requires url)
 -s: search channels and descriptions (requires a query)
 -S: search channels and content with descriptions (requires a query)
 -t: list all content less then n days old
 -T: set maximum days to look back for download queue (use bedore -d)
 -u: update the content in all channels
 -h: display this help message

EXAMPLE: ./SwarmTv -a http://www.legaltorrents.com/rss.xml -l
EXAMPLE: ./SwarmTv -iS title
EXAMPLE: ./SwarmTv -e http://www.legaltorrents.com/rss.xml -T30 -n3 -d

Read the latest README, INSTALL and TODO for an uptodate view of our progress.

Dependencies:

pkgconfig	http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/	>= 0.9.0
glibmm	http://www.gtkmm.org/	>= 2.4.0
libxml++	http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/	>= 2.10.0
libsigc++	http://libsigc.sourceforge.net/	>= 2.0.0
cURL	http://curl.haxx.se/	>= 7.12.0
PCRE	http://www.pcre.org/	>= 6.4
libtorrent	http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/	>= 0.9.0

SwarmTv revision 75

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:58:32 +0200

So the new SwarmTv has reached revision 75.
And we are at number 12 of 23 on our Roadmap to Alpha..

That means, it downloads RSS files and adds them to it's internal XML database.
You can list and search that database.

Ranzbak has put a lot of effort in the internal design, so now we can code quite fast and efficient.

USAGE  : ./SwarmTv [-a url] [-l] [-L] [-c url] [-[i][sS] query]
 -a: add rss (requires url)
 -l: list
 -L: list all
 -c: show content of channel (requires url)
 -i: make search case insensitive (use before -s or -S)
 -s: search channels and descriptions (requires a query)
 -S: search channels and content with descriptions (requires a query)
 -h: display this help messege.

EXAMPLE: ./SwarmTv -a http://www.legaltorrents.com/rss.xml -l
EXAMPLE: ./SwarmTv -iS title

Remember this is pre alpha software, so it will proppably not be usefull..
But you can download it in bzip2, gzip and zip format.
Or use subversion:
svn co http://svn.etv.cx/svn/SwarmTv/trunk SwarmTvDependencies:

libxml++	http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/
libsigc++	http://libsigc.sourceforge.net/
cURL	http://curl.haxx.se/
PCRE	http://www.pcre.org/

New design

Sat, 13 May 2006 23:13:46 +0200

After starting developing on swarmTv the path that was chosen resulted in a complex and buggy system. Because of that the project team has decided te refacture the design of SwarmTv, and make it more managable.
In the new design the data will be stored in one single place in the program, inside a single database.
A status flag will define in what stage the download is.
This will make the design simpler, more stable and managable.

SwarmTv rev:40

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 22:52:04 +0200

It is not useable for public..

It does some tests for channels and xml and is broken..
But we are working on it.. Well ranzbak has for the most part..
But the_JinX is getting back on track.. As soon as he meets with ranzbak to run thrue the code.. and add some comments..

This is just a reminder that SwarmTv is not dead..

Metafiles and the near future of SwarmTv

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:22:46 +0100

Ranzbak has been working on the metafiletree part of SwarmTv.
As soon as the code stabalizes it will be entered in the main SwarmTv repository.

You can download a "hello world" at the SwarmTv download page now..

Feel free to add in the discussion at the new SwarmTv BrainStorm wiki.

Progress on the SwarmTv project again.

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 08:37:04 +0100

After decorating my new home I finaly found some time to spend on the SwarmTv project again. The POC of SwarmTv helped me a lot in understanding the structure that we need in the SwarmTv program. When progress is made, updates will appear on this site !Work is being done on the object model used to store and search the indexservers/channels/content. After this design is finalised, we'll put more effort in figuring out how to use the rtorrent library in our project. After that the API to the frontend of SwarmTv will be defined, and the development of the SwarmTV project can start in the Alpha phase.