I am not entirely sure how far to take this one, one idea is to start at the beginning and explain what torrents are, how they work, and why they are cool, the other is to jump right in and explain why I think it is time for “TivoTorrents” and what exactly they are. I tend to be verbose, looks like I am going to take the long winded road, feel free to skip past the “Introduction to Bit Torrent” if you already know what it is and how it works.

By now, it is safe to say that everyone knows about peer to peer networks, or at the very least, you know it is a place where folks swap files and other stuff with one another, usually illegally. The problem with these p2p networks as they are called, is that they are not particularly fast, you are pulling a single file from a single other user out there. At least, thats how it was when I was a kid :-) It has gotten a little smarter and files that are identical are pulled from more than one source, but in the end, your simply downloading a file. On the plus side of this is that there is very little that can be done to stop all this. When you perform a search for a file, you are searching an index off most of the known computers within that p2p network, there is no single source to take out, much to the RIAA’s and MPAA’s chagrin.

Bit-Torrent works a little different. There is in fact a central location that can, and often is, taken out and shut down. Here’s the skinny:

Bit-Torrent Tracker - A tracker is simply a website, it contains little tiny files called torrents. The trackers sole job is to list the torrents and provide a way for an end user to find those torrents and download them. If there is a hub in this wheel, it is the tracker, this is the place the RIAA and MPAA goes after when they want to shut it down. What you do need to understand, is these trackers absolutely do not provide any real files to download, they only provide small files that are pointers to the real files. A tracker by it’s very nature is doing nothing wrong. In most all cases, the maintainer of the tracker only maintains it, doing very little to control what torrents are listed within.

Bit-Torrent Torrent File - The torrent file is what you end up downloading from the above mentioned tracker. As I said before, it is just a small file, in simplistic terms, it contains a set of instructions that tell where the real files are. So, lets say you go to a tracker and download the Star Wars torrent file. At this point, you have done nothing wrong at all, you simply now own a very small file, that when fed into the proper application, will instruct that application where to go to download the real Star Wars file.

Bit-Torrent Application - This is where the real magic happens. Once you have first visited the tracker, then successfully downloaded the correct torrent file, you need to open it in a Bit-Torrent application. This application reads the file and follows the instructions in it to download the real files.

By now you have to be wondering, what’s the difference here compared to a p2p network? The difference is the tracker, it plays one more role in this game. As soon as you open the torrent file, the Bit-Torrent application starts talking back to the tracker. The tracker holds a list of all the other people who currently have loaded the same torrent file. You then make a connection to all of those people, and all of those people make a connection to you. Now we have a huge “swarm” of people all interested in the same file. The Bit-Torrent application will start to download small chunks of the real file from all the other users who have already begun downloading the file. Since you do not have the entire file, you are considered a “leecher”, as you are currently leeching the file from a swarm of others. However, while you are downloading, you are also uploading the portions you have downloaded to others. In general, the more you upload/share, the faster you can download. As soon as you have downloaded the entire file, you move out of leecher status and into seeder status. As a seeder, you have the entire file, and your sole purpose it so share small chunks of that file to all the remaining leechers out there. Of course, you can simply quit your Bit-Torrent application after you have gotten what you needed, but the general idea is to give back to the community what you took from it, so let it continue to seed for as long as possible.

Bit-Torent works really well for new popular files, as there is interest and there are lots of seeders and leechers out there to support the sharing of the file. As interest dies down, you may find your self having downloaded all you can, but there are no remaining seeders that are sharing the file, so you are stuck. In these cases, you either find it elsewhere, or sometimes you can post to the tracker message boards, assuming they have them set up, and ask that someone re-seed the file.

That’s the really simple version of how Bit-Torrent works, sure, I simplified, and even left out some bits here and there.. heh ‘bits’ :-) however, it should allow one with no concept of it to get a rough idea about how it works. And now, enter my “Tivo Torrents” idea…

There are very few things I have bought that truly have changed the way I think about them in general. What it boils down to, is of the thousands of items I buy on a yearly basis, there are only a small handful that are so truly wonderful that I can not stop evangelizing them. Of course, at the top of my list is pretty much anything made by Apple. Two others come to mind, one many people just think I am nuts, the other, well, friggin movie starts can not stop talking about them.

First is the Phillips Senseo™, yeah, a coffee maker! Its just so damn brilliant, in a few minutes, you can have a hot and frothy (ewww, sounds perverted :-)) cup of Joe™ ready and waiting for you. There is literally no clean up, as the whole thing runs off of these little “pads” of coffee grounds. I would easily pay a few hundred bucks for one of these now that I know how they work, the great part is, you can pick them up anywhere for about sixty bucks. Get one, they rock!

Second? TiVo of course. If you don’t know what it is, I am not telling you, I am certainly not going to write an intro to TiVo. You are reading a blog, you must have come out of that cave a while ago. The TiVo has one fault, and not a fault of it’s own, but one of the networks. I am lucky, and have a DirecTV based unit, so it has two tuners in it, meaning I can record two things at the same time, and watch a third. Most others are not so lucky, yet they still love them to death. The networks love to pit shows against each other, you end up missing one favorite in favor of your more favorite show. This just sucks! You can play games with the time zone difference if you have satellite, but it just gets old, and quick. Why can’t I have all my shows all the time? Why do the networks get to decide what I watch and at what time? Yes, TiVo alleviates this to a degree, depending on your model, one or two degrees max.

I end up running around to the various torrent tracker sites and seeing what shows I missed and if they are available. If I do find them, I can download them, and in some cases, even watch them on my computer. There are of course snags. The first snag is you have to be a codec scientist to even know what to download. As if the average home user knows the difference between:

Friends ep12 HDTV-LOL DIVX
Friends ep12 HDTV-LOL mpg
Friends ep12 HDTV-LOL AVI

At times, I have seen 10 or more “flavors” of various TV shows. I generally go thorgh the trouble of beating Quicktime into submissiqon or seeing if VLC will play them, but this is just too much trouble. Add to all this I have to find the damn thing in the first place, and I just give up, if it does not come out on DVD later, the networks lost me, I won’t ever see the show.

How do you fix all this? TivoTorrents of course :-) All the tools are there, the community is there, however, the organization is just non existent. Here is how I see it panning out:

First we need a platform, this will facilitate the “guide” aspects of the system. Much like TiVo and DirecTV have guides for finding shows, we need a guide. Off the top of my head, there are two community driven, open source guides out there, that send out xml based feeds of what is going on in TV land. With these, a platform is built, nothing more than three simple applications, one for Mac, one for Linux, and one for Windows. I will get into the details of what this app does in a moment, for now, as a end user, just think of it as TV Guide for your computer.

Since there is already a huge community of people who somehow get video off of their televisions and into their computers, we need to get them organized. These people would more or less be the backbone of the system. Instead of putting up torrents at various websites, they will upload them into a custom system where they get linked up to the guide system I previously spoke of. Anyone is free to submit a torrent to the guide. This in short is how television shows enter into the system. At this point though, it is still a big huge mess, we have not addressed the file compatibility issues or organizational needs.

Here is where the desktop application comes into play. For every show you want to download, it will cost you a point, to gain a point, you have to give back to the system. You do this by voting and categorizing. So, you download the latest episode of 24, you find you are able to play it on a Mac, and you find it is correctly linked to the right location in the guide system. You are now required to give that data back, a few clicks here and there and you have categorized it as playable on a Mac and also gained a point. You now get to download one more item, if you want more, you have to get more points.

The point system keeps the process clean and workable for anyone. Now, I as an end user, can fire up my desktop application, edit some preference setting telling it I only want to see Mac compatible shows, and I am off and running. I can pre-schedule shows I want auto downloaded in the future just by navigating around in the guide. This application will work in the background, and from time to time, nag me to supply data back about what I have downloaded, in order to get more download points.

Much like Wikipedia, the community is what keeps it working, keeps it clean, and makes it something where the barrier of entry to a non technical user is very low. Good things are coming in the way of wireless streaming of video to televisions, so hopefully all these television shows you downloaded will no longer be tethered to your computer. Maybe Apple will do it with a video port on the Airport Express, or you can do it today with something like the EyeTV from ElGato.

It’s a bit of work to put all this together, it will certainly require some dedicated programmers to work all this out. The worst bits of it is that there is no certainty. Something like this has mass appeal, and we run into the all to common problem of the RIAA or MPAA shutting down the tracker. If that happens, this entire system fails. I have hopes that some of the new stuff being added to Bit-Torrent will alleviate this, but as it is now, there is no real solution to the single point of failure. The best I can come up with is a call for dedicated folks to act as mirrors for all this data. If one goes offline, hopefully there are a few hundred more to keep up the pace. There are also other countries who seem to have a little sturdier ground when it comes to offering up services that don’t quite make the US mega corporations happy. I consider that to be a small detail, there are much larger hurdles to overcome than keeping a system like this online, the first being getting a solid framework in place and enough interested developers. As it is now, Bit-Torrent is a semi-underground, mostly mysterious tool that only geeks use, this could bring it to the masses.