Sidepodcast

Bits and Pieces

Following up on an earlier post relating to torrent support at Sidepodcast, I figured it might make sense, having covered the reasons for using peer-to-peer technology, to also look at how it works from a user perspective.

Within the past couple of weeks, links to torrent files have been appearing all over this site. You'll find them beside episode names within the archive pages, in the small panel to the right of audio shows and beneath the transport controls in videos.

In order to use these .torrent files, you'll need some client software and recently we've been getting a lot of mileage out of Vuze. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems and it's free to download from the homepage.

Once installed, you can click on any of the torrent links on this site and Vuze will download the associated episode, partly from our server but additionally pieces will come from any other user who's also done the same.

You can track progress using the Download tab on the dashboard, and once complete the episode will play within the application. We've mostly been avoiding P2P software because until recently Vuze (formerly Azureus) was a bit geeky to work with, and to see just how geeky it used to be, try hitting the Advanced button. I'm sticking to simple windows for the time being.

Additionally, by using the integrated search bar, entering sidepodcast will bring up a list of audio and video that we've uploaded onto the Vuze network. It'll take a very long time to get everything published though, so for the time being we recommend using the various links dotted around this site.

There are of course other torrent clients available, and if you know of any good ones please do let us know. Also if you use Vuze, tell us what you think of it and feel free to add us as a friend by looking up sidepodcast.

F1 Torrents of the Legal Kind

We talked briefly on last weeks show about some minor issues we've had recently in regards to our bandwidth costs. If you managed to get to the end of that episode we mentioned a spike in traffic led our hosting company, Media Temple, to warn us we could be looking at a bill for $350+ at the end of the month, and then the traffic spiked yet further.

The Price of Fish

As you can imagine, there's no way we could afford those kind of costs once, let alone on an ongoing basis. The hosting company includes in their grid-service, one terabyte of bandwidth per month and until now that's suited us just fine. Anything over that though gets billed at more than two dollars per gigabyte and in July we shifted almost double our allocation.

Media Temple do a sterling job of providing us with solid web hosting, the kind that lets us handle 1,600 comments per thread without blinking, but they never claimed to offer infinite bandwidth.

We've obviously been testing out a bunch of alternate solutions and amongst them is Amazon S3, which in truth has been a little unreliable of late, but does offer unlimited bandwidth (although it is expensive). More importantly though, S3 acts as a tracker for torrent files as well as a permanent seeder and this is where things get interesting.

Getting Personal

Torrents, BitTorrent and peer-to-peer file sharing tends to come in for a lot of criticism in the press, mostly when record companies sue pensioners and toddlers for alleged music piracy. However, the concept of sharing data between multiple peers has many legitimate uses, BBC's iPlayer is based on the same principles, and it's the legal distribution of data that we're interested in.

Making our audio and video available for download via peer-to-peer networks, in theory reduces our bandwidth requirements to almost nothing, as clients share pieces of data amongst themselves (at least for anyone obtaining files using this method). Additionally, if no-one is sharing a particular file, as will likely be the case at first, then the S3 peer will always be available.

It's easy to see why we're fans of P2P, and we'll be promoting it more in the future. It'll take a while to copy everything we've ever created onto to the bookseller's servers, but thus far torrent files are available for:

• All video files
• Every episode of F1 Digest
• All interviews
• Most of the mini-series
• Recent episodes of the weekly audio show

Additionally we're adding links on individual blog posts alongside the familiar transcript shortcuts and standard file downloads.

We're not expecting this to make a huge difference at first, and neither are we removing any of the existing download options. In fact, unless you're feeling brave or are specifically interested in testing these new download options, things will stay exactly the same.

As ever we'd appreciate any and all feedback, let us know if works for you or if there's anything we can improve.