IceShare is an unfinished peercasting system for Ogg multimedia. It has been in the planning stages since early 2004 but holdups in the development of other Xiph.org Foundation technologies have prevented much visible progress. Peercasting is a method of multicasting streams, usually audio and/or video, to the internet via peer-to-peer technology. ... Ogg is an open standard for a free container format for digital multimedia, unrestricted by software patents and designed for efficient streaming and manipulation. ... The Xiph. ...

How It Works

Each user who receives an IceShare stream will also upload the stream as well to help continue the network. This allows the broadcaster to only broadcast a stream once or twice, and allow the users to distribute it among themselves. This requires very little bandwidth from the broadcaster. IceShare intends to use BitTorrent's swarming design to make this work but expects a much smarter tracker to orchestrate the flow of data through the network. Streaming media is multimedia that is continuously received by, and normally displayed to, the end-user while it is being delivered by the provider. ... BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. ...

Clients use the IceT protocol to connect to a Tracker and make a request for a file. This file must already be known by the client and is typically supplied to the client by a URL, such as icet://127.0.0.1/something.ogg. In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. ... A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (spelled out as an acronym, not pronounced as earl), or Web address, is a standardized address name layout for resources (such as documents or images) on the Internet (or elsewhere). ...

The Tracker, knowing which other IceShare Clients have the file already, will direct the new Client to one or more of the other Clients for specific pieces of the file they've requested. The new Client verifies pieces of the stream with the Tracker as they are received and thereby informs the Tracker that they have that piece available for others.

See also

• SayaTV - Internet TV Social Network
• Icecast
• Peercasting
• PeerCast - A similar project
• MediaBlog - A similar project( just begin )

Icecast is a free streaming media project maintained by the Xiph. ... Peercasting is a method of multicasting streams, usually audio and/or video, to the internet via peer-to-peer technology. ... PeerCast is an open source streaming media multicast tool. ... MediaBlog is a software that distributes almost all kinds of streams on P2P network based on VLC player. ...

External link

• http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare (official site)