Stephen Judge's dashboard

Indeed I am more interested in SRWare Iron than Chrome, so any building on Chrome should be done at the Chromium level so that forks of Chrome can utilise these developments – Stephen Judge, on July 11, 2009 13:45

Great, I'll look forward to putting my OGG Theora videos on Blip.tv so. – Stephen Judge, on July 09, 2009 11:10

I would encourage your users to use an OpenID login, one user name and password for all OpenID enabled websites, it's an excellent system. There are loads of OpenID providers where your visitors can get and OpenID, I would recommend myVidoop, it uses an picture password logon system.

This is the reply from my free hosting provider: Host-ed.net about this plugin. It seems this is the standard response for all free hosts:

"Hello Stephen,

This type of plugin is making a connection from our hosting to their server.

This requires outgoing connections to be allowed, which is forbidden on our free hosting due to security reasons.

Paid web hosting account can have outgoing connections allowed after an explicit request to the support team.

If you upgrade your account now, I can allow the outgoing connections for your account.

Nestor"

I'm glad to see a torrent add-on for Songbird, but I believe the ability for Songbird to handle .torrent files is a necessity and should be integrated into the core.

Ultimately I think a lot of people here have the wrong idea as to how downloading by BitTorrent should be used in Songbird.

Let us say that for the more Geeky of users here, BitTorrent downloading is a common activity and for the most part they will download everything under the sun, including legally questionable content. These type of users are far more likely to use a feature rich stand alone client like Vuze or uTorrent. But the use case for BitTorrent in Songbird is different.

Songbird's objective is to bring the media of the web to the desktop via the player and for it to be tightly integrated. One key aspect of Songbird is its ability to discover song files on web pages and to give you a clean easy to use interface to download these song with. If we take for example the website Jamendo, this is the perfect example of a website that Songbird is designed for. Jamendo offers the ability download of the songs on their site as individual file downloads or zipped archive downloads, but they also offer BitTorrent downloads. Songbird should be able to identify this .torrent file, read it and download the songs connected to this .torrent file as seamlessly and easily as it downloads individual song files at the moment.

Another reason it needs BitTorrent support is for Podcast support. Songbird lacks the functionality to support Podcast subscription and management effectively at the moment. But I suspect it is something they want to do as it was one of their questions on a recent survey they conducted. So if they are serious about supporting Podcast subscriptions then they need to have BitTorrent support built into the client. There may be the assumption by some users that Podcasts are only delivered as direct downloads from an RSS feed. In actual fact many smaller amateur Podcast producers may be more likely to distribute their Podcast on a BitTorrent RSS feed so they can avoid expensive hosting and distribution costs.

Looking at the possible 'bloat' that add BitTorrent support to the client would bring. In actual fact it should be very small. If you stay focussed on the idea that you are enabling BitTorrent support to allow the likes of downloading song files from Jamendo or Podcasts, and you are not trying to provide a feature rich BitTottorent client, then your BitTorrent integration should be small. Forget about trying to download large movie ripped files from Pirate Bay or some such, stick to your Vuze or uTorrent for that, and ignore those legal headaches. Focus of BitTorrent support or appropriate BitTorrent sites and services like Jamendo, LegalTorrents and Podcasts. In this focus then you simply have to integrate the libTorrent library into your core and you are done. You don't need any extra user controls or dialogues.

What I am talking about here is something that has already been done before without adding any bloat or legal problems to the software. The Juice podcast receiver supports BitTorrent Podcasts and it has been around since the first inception of RSS. The Miro TV platform also supports BitTorrent feeds and downloads and Miro is not that dissimaler to Songbird in its objective. They have both used the libTorrent library and have remained stable and bloat free. Any instability or bloat you find in either of these clients is certainly not from libTorrent.

Remember not all users of Songbird will be Geeks and they just want it to work and work just as iTunes does because at the end of the day this is what it will be compared to. Early adopters of Songbird that are typically geeks want all the bells and whistles but at the end of the day the user experience for everyone needs to be smooth, transparent and easy.

So yes to BitTorrent support, but examine why and let this objective guide you. Leave the major BitTorrent downloading to specialised standalone clients like Vuze and uTorrent.

While I am typing this in Songbird, I have listening to 5 songs and in that time Songbird should be just finished downloading some new songs from Jamendo or my next Podcast via integrated BitTorrent support.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here, what did you have in mind? – Stephen Judge, on June 07, 2009 20:02

It worked for iTunes, the next step would be to work with the Songbird team to integrate this in Songbird.

The key is to have a full and constantly update Podcast Directory and to provide stats to the publishers on how many people are downloading. When publisher see the downloads and see people use 7digital more, they are more likely to plug it on their Podcast, for them at the moment it's all about iTunes and that's all they're concerned about. Stats shows listeners, listeners, builds an ad revenue base.