Wikipedia nutzt BitTorrent für HTML5-Video

NewTeeVee berichtet, dass Wikipedia angefangen hat, BitTorrent-basierte P2P-Technologie zu nutzen, um die Traffic-Kosten für Videos zu senken:

The trial is based on Swarmplayer, which has been developed by the EU-funded P2P Next Project. P2P Next is officially releasing the developers preview of Swarmplayer 2.0 today. An official beta test is planned for October, but I was told by one of the people behind P2P Next that the current version is already considered stable.

Swarmplayer used to be a standalone player that could be used to access and stream video from BitTorrent swarms. Its new iteration instead comes in the form of a Firefox plugin, which combines traditional web seeding with P2P data distribution to stream videos right within a web page. The plugin displays information about transferred bandwidth in the browser’s status bar and enables users to edit their sharing settings through a dedicated web UI.

Wer das Browser-Plugin nicht installiert hat, bekommt den normalen Video-Stream von den Wikipedia-Servern.

BitTorrent wird aufgrund seiner Effizienz bei der Verbreitung von Dateien auch von Facebook und Twitter eingesetzt, um intern Server schnell und ressourcenschonend zu aktualisieren.