The attached paper claims that Bitcomet possesses a VOD service. The only thing that comes close (but which definitely isn’t VOD) is the preview feature described here: http://wiki.bitcomet.com/Preview_while_Downloading
What gives?
Cheers,
Marijn
LiveBT Providing Video-on-demand Streaming Service over BitTorrent.pdf
LiveBT Providing Video-on-demand Streaming Service over BitTorrent.pdf (476 KB)
BitComet doesn’t attempt to support streaming video.
BitComet WILL attempt to let you preview some types of partially downloaded video files. BC’s internal viewer has to interpolate the missing pieces. It’s slow and not very good at this, so the more of the file you have already downloaded, the better it works, but even if you’ve downloaded the majority of the torrent, this is painfully slow.
This was never intended as support for streaming media. Its purpose is to allow you to see & hear what you’re downloading before you’ve completely finished the download and spent the time, only to discover that the quality is awful or the spoken language is Ferengi, and not waste any more time on it.
The paper’s authors may have mistaken this feature as support for streaming video
Actually, I believe that the paper’s authors were speaking about the Preview download mode which is referenced here in the Wiki and goes a step further than the first option by **attempting **to download all the pieces sequentially.
Indeed, the Wiki is a bit cryptic about that. I’ll try to put all the facts in one place.
But BitComet never advertised it as “streaming” or VOD. It **attempts **to obtain similar results; it doesn’t guarantee them. I’ve tested it once and it worked fairly well (with some visual artifacts though, due to missing pieces I guess). But it highly depends on the speeds obtainable for that torrent.
And it slows down the download speed for that task.
The option is kind of concealed, and accessible only by right-click menu in BitComet. Probably, exactly for that reason (preventing users from enabling it by mistake and then complaining about low speeds).
I’ve modified the wiki under your first link to include the explanations about both options.