Stream video over a peer-to-peer bittorrent network

Sharing video is becoming increasingly important with bandwidths and hard drives getting bigger.

It’s about time then than someone harnessed the power of P2P technology to share video which is what the developers of SwarmPlayer have done. SwarmPlayer essentially combines three ways of video watching and sharing i.e. Downloading videos, streaming videos, and watching videos while they are being generated i.e. via webcam. Effectively, SwarmPlayer allows a single player to download movies, watch video-on-demand, and watch live video streams using one technology, while taking advantage of the popularity and maturity of existing BitTorrent clients.

At the moment SwarmPlayer is purely in testing mode and you can only watch two videos – a BBC test program (a weather report) and something called the “Fabchannel” which is basically a webcam on a TV station rooftop in Amsterdam – not very interesting. However, the SwarmPlayer principle looks good – you can see how many people are watching a stream at one time via the stats page which is great for those that are learning to produce their own broadcasts and want to know how popular it is via SwarmPlayer.

SwarmPlayer is potentially a new and exciting way to share video over the net although it may be a while before the finished product is released.