IceShare
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IceShare is an unfinished peercasting system for Ogg multimedia. It has been in the planning stages since early 2004 but holdups in the development of other Xiph.org technologies have prevented much visible progress.
How It Works
Each user who receives an IceShare stream will also upload the stream as well to help continue the network. This allows the broadcaster to only broadcast a stream once or twice, and allow the users to distribute it among themselves, so that not much bandwidth is needed from the originator. IceShare intends to use BitTorrent's swarming philosophy to make this work but expects a much smarter tracker to orchestrate the flow of data through the network.
Clients use the IceT protocol (http://wiki.xiph.org/IceT) to connect to a Tracker and make a request for a file. This file must already be known by the client and is typically supplied to the client by a URL, such as icet://127.0.0.1/something.ogg.
The Tracker, knowing which other IceShare Clients have the file already, will send the new Client to one or more other Clients for specific pieces of the file they've requested. The new Client verify pieces of the stream with the Tracker as they are received, and thereby, inform the Tracker that they can now help send that file to other Clients.
See also
- Icecast
- Peercasting
- PeerCast - A similar project
External link
- http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare (official site)