Tribler: A Brand New Peer-to-Peer System
2007-09-06
The technology is being evaluated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is trying to create a standardised Internet broadcasting system across Europe. Tribler has also reportedly been used as part of work to turn the Sony Playstation 3 games console into a video-sharing device.
The new system is intended to counteract the sluggishness that can result from P2P users downloading content without sharing with others. Dr Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has been working with Dr David Parkes of Harvard University to implement the accounting system into Tribler.
Dr Pouwelse explained: “In our model your TV would use ‘TV watching minutes’, our form of P2P currency, to download content. The TV would connect directly to the Internet and provide video on demand in HDTV quality. After you watch a program on TV, the system would automatically share this program during the night with other people, until your ‘TV watching minutes’ credit is healthy again. If we get this right, it would mean quite a change in the TV business.”
Franc Kozamernik, Senior Engineer at the EBU, commented regarding the adoption of Tribler by the EBU: “Tribler is a good candidate. We are in the process of testing it and checking whether it fulfils our requirements or not.”
About Tribler
Tribler is file sharing client for Internet TV.
Specifically, Tribler is an open source Peer-to-Peer client with various features for watching videos online. It supports standard features such as key word searching for content and segmented downloading. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, but as it's using the Python programming language it is possible to run on any Python supported platform. For the user interface it uses wxPython.
The name Tribler stems from the word Tribe, refering to the usage of social networks in this P2P client. The first version of Tribler was a small enhancement on the ABC (Yet Another BitTorrent Client), leaked out on the web on February 26, 2006.
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