p2pnet.net News Feature:- Last November, Freenet author Ian Clarke introduced Dijjer, his new open source p2p content distribution tool.

“Dijjer is a peer-to-peer HTTP cache, designed to allow the distribution of large files from Web servers while virtually eliminating the bandwidth cost to the file’s publisher,” he told us at the time.

“Dijjer is designed to be simple, elegant, and to cleanly integrate with existing applications where possible. Dijjer uses “UDP hole punching” to allow it to operate from behind firewalls without any need for manual reconfiguration. Dijjer’s distributed and scalable content distribution algorithm is inspired by Freenet.”

Here, Clarke and fellow-developer Steven Starr give us a progress update.

Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Dijjer is an open source tool with one simple goal in mind: to change the economics of content distribution on the web.

Bandwidth continues to be a significant problem for anyone hosting big files online, as soon as your music, mp3 blog, or movie gets too popular, either your site goes down or you get hit with a huge bandwidth bill. Online creators are faced with enough challenges as it is; we think paying for popularity should not be one of them.

Since bandwidth currently costs about US$0.10 per gigabyte of data transferred, if you create a 100MB mpeg movie and you want to put it on your website, every user that downloads your movie will cost you about 1 cent. This may be trivial if you have a slow trickle of downloads, but not if other people start to link to your video, or worse yet, it gets linked from a website like p2pnet or Slashdot.

Suddenly, your site might be contending with hundreds or even thousands of downloads per minute, and one of two things will happen; either your ISP shuts down access to the mpeg, in which case you’ve squandered your precious 15 minutes of audience-building, or your ISP keeps serving the file, and you get billed for hundreds of dollars in bandwidth costs for simply being popular. And if you really become popular, say, JibJab or Star Wars Kid popular, your costs skyrocket into the thousands.

Until now, one of the only ways around this was to use a tool like BitTorrent to distribute your video. BitTorrent ingeniously uses the computers of those downloading your video to help redistribute it, thus dramatically reducing your central server bandwidth costs.

But BitTorrent is not without it’s shortcomings. You, the content distributor, must set up a “tracker”, a piece of software that will coordinate the distribution of your video. Setting up a tracker is far from impossible, but it does require a bit of technical skill that can rule out many potential content distributors.

Secondly, BitTorrent requires that users behind firewalls must reconfigure their firewalls for optimal performance. This can often require digging up user manuals to find long-forgotten firewall passwords. Further, a user must switch to the user interface of whatever BitTorrent client they are using, and must wait until the entire video is downloaded before they can view it.

Dijjer changes all that. What distinguishes Dijjer from p2p tools like Bittorrent is how easy it is to use for publishers and users. Using Dijjer on your website is really simple: you don’t need to install anything. Just put a file on your site as you normally do, but add “http://dijjer.org/get/” to the beginning of your links.

So a normal link looks like this: http://mysite.com/video.mov

And a dijjer link looks like this: http://dijjer.org/get/http://mysite.com/video.mov

When users click on a Dijjer link, they’ll get some of the file from your website, but most of it will come from other people running Dijjer.

That’s how you save bandwidth.

And when someone clicks on the link who hasn’t used Dijjer before, they’ll get help installing it. After that, downloads happen seamlessly inside their web browser, while most p2p clients make you use a separate program.

So Dijjer plays media files as they download; if you’re downloading a song or a movie, you can listen or watch it as it’s downloading.

And there are a few other things about Dijjer worth mentioning:

• Dijjer works great for RSS & podcasting.
• Dijjer works perfectly with ipodder, ipodderx, radio, and all other podcasting aggregators.
• Dijjer works for Windows, Mac, and Linux; everybody can run Dijjer.
• There’s no spyware, there’s no adware, there are no secrets.
• The Dijjer source code is free, open source, and available to everyone.

And finally, for copyright holders, Dijjer only downloads files published on websites, it’s no different than a normal web server from a legal standpoint.

We’re pretty excited about Dijjer.

It’s the first of several initiatives we’re working on to help decentralized creators find and build an audience and over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out others.

We hope Dijjer is just the beginning.

Ian Clark and Steven Starr

Go here for more on Dijjer.

[Starr founded ChangeTv. Before hooking up Clarke on Freenet and Uprizer in 2000, he ran the New York film operation for William Morris, co-created MTV's The State, wrote/directed Joey Breaker and ran the largest community radio signal in the US, KPFK-FM. He got his start in the mid-seventies as a college rep for CBS and A&M, and promoting concerts for Bob Marley and Little Feat.]

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See:-
content distribution tool - Ian Clarke’s new p2p tool, p2pnet, November 22, 2004

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