[Foundation-l] Alternative approach for better video support

[Daniel Arnold]

On Wednesday 25 July 2007 06:26:53 THURNER rupert wrote:
> > [...] So please let us brainstorm how to turn this
> > into a good opportunity for all of us without sacrificing parts of our
> > goals and independence. [...]
>
> we currently try to help setting up a research project co financed by the
> european union to exactly help improving this situation with bringing p2p
> technology and wiki technology closer.

p2p definitely was a big help in the past when we distributed the Wikipedia 
DVD images. So p2p has proven to be useful on distributing large files that 
don't change frequently.

However p2p between clients somehow connected with the wiki itself has the 
disadvantage that you require a special software and this again is 
technically problematic like requiring Java or Flash plugins.

Distributing files among mirror servers is usually a network of less than 100 
participants. There is usually a defined list of mirrors with known average 
mirror update delay. Large downloadservers very often use Rsync in order to 
mirror whole directory trees of other servers. So Rsync is an introduced 
working technology with a quite intelligent algorithm.

In my approach the user would traditionally get the file via HTTP from the 
mirror (he even wouldnt realize it if he doesn't look closely on the URL of 
this file). So there wouldn't be any change on the client side, which is a 
big advantage.

But maybe I understand you wrong. What exactly do you mean with bringing p2p 
and wikis closer together?

Arnomane
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