2004 video : cool moves

[sukhdev]

since i had a few mails saying the 1st video worked great i've uploaded another one. this one is really HUGE (54mb),still in its original resolution and is the 2004 gaastra video. Some great freestyle moves by Matt (in slow motion) and jaw dropping jumps. see it at :

 bluefinz video gallery

again,if you are not on broadband this is probably not feasible to download.

[<Zap>]

Awezome vid dude!! Tho its like kinda beeeeeg. Juz hope my boss dun notice who's clogging da line! More! More!

[hiwindjunkie]

cool ... & some nice shots of tiffany ward (?) too!

[<JohnP>]

Yeah that one is pretty cool, and great work too, love the way the website just keeps getting better. Kinda curious though, how big is your server and how many hits do you get?

[<Juri Munkki>]

I haven't downloaded the video yet, but I suspect a lot of people are downloading it right now and probably causing a lot of traffic to your site.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if hosting videos like this over HTTP would turn out to be a problem due to bandwidth costs.

If so, I would suggest that you change the hosting method to BitTorrent. The way that works is that you download the BitTorrent software and then create a small "torrent file" using that program. That small file is like any ordinary file and can be put on your HTTP server in your gallery. You then keep that file open on your BitTorrent client as "seed" copy.

Users will download the torrent file and open it in BitTorrent to start the download. Downloads work using peer to peer technology, so people will also forward copies of what they have downloaded as they are downloading. As an end-result the network load is automatically divided so that as more users download, more bandwidth becomes available. It works very well and especially well as the number of simultaneous downloaders increases.

Clients are available for Windows, MacOS X and most Unix variants.

[<Juri Munkki>]

A few more words about BitTorrent:

If you have a slow connection and you can't download a whole file on one sitting, you can halt it at any time and resume it from where it left off without any waste.

A  few weeks ago I was eagerly downloading movies from FormulaWindsurfing.org, just like everybody else. Unfortunately some of those movie downloads stalled just before the end and I was unable to finish the downloads.

What you don't get with BitTorrent is the ability to view the first few seconds of a movie and then abort if you don't like it. You either get the whole thing and then watch it or you get an incomplete file that is useless unless you finish the download.

I'm downloading the Gaastra video now... Started out at 30KB/s, but it slowed down to 1KB/s and 4KB/s for a while and it's back up to about 20KB/s now. Your server is taking the load remarkably well so far.

[<Juri Munkki>]

My apologies for the multiple posts...

It seems you need a "tracker" process too, unless you can find one that you can use (not sure how that works).

BitTorrent is here: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

I'll shut up for now. I hope. OK, I'll make that a promise...

[sukhdev]

Hi Juri,

thanks for the comments and the pointer to bit torrent, i guess thats something worth looking into; this is really an experiment on my part but it looks insane, i uploaded the video this morning and there have been 600+ downloads in half a day. server held up pretty well so far, if you are getting 20 to 30kb from where you are thats pretty ok i guess.

John P,

server currently has a couple of hundred meg but thats getting eaten up real fast.

re traffic,the numbers are interesting. I track page accesses and hits, together with visit duration, navigation etc so that we have an idea what works and what doesnt. October is pretty typical, we have had approx 80,000 page views (number of times a page on the site is visited) and about 500,000 hits (a hit is counted each time a page, image or file is viewed or download).

page views are more relevant. we also track the total data traffic from the site, its been averaging about 60mb most months but this month will go berserk due to the videos; as of an hour ago we have had 3.69GB transferred.

35% of all accesses are local (singapore), rest are from all over, for october its 60 countries counted to date...not counting those who access from work (.com or .edu etc).

[<Juri Munkki>]

Well, I went out to see a movie and when I came back, the download had stalled at around the 70% mark. If I download again, that's 38MB of wasted bandwidth at both ends. If I don't finish the download, I can't save the movie, so I can only watch what I have this once.

It started out well, but in the end it was the same story as with www.formulawindsurfing.org.

Apple is using Akamai Networks to distribute movie trailers - that's about the best way to do this kind of stuff, but I think it costs a lot more than the windsurfing industry can afford.

[sukhdev]

Juri, we could either move you to singapore (its warmer!) or...hmmm..figure some other way out. for local downloads its super fast..i ran a few tests and got about 50+kb from 2 locations.

you may want to try the free Download Accelerator 5.3 from www.speedbit.com. I've used it for a while with good results, supports recovery from failed transfers etc. doesnt have spyware, the free version has some nagging ads but works really well.

we are up to almost 900 downloads in the 1st 24 hours, i'm waiting for my ISP to scream re the bandwidth but since their link out to the Singapore backbone for iSPs is 100mbits perhaps we might get away with it.

[<david>]

download works great in OZ... Juri, you should move to warmer climes :-)... I thought thought the Finns had this IT stuff sorted?

[<Juri Munkki>]

OK, so I was already doing three other downloads at the same time, so even my own connection was heavily loaded...

Besides, if the other end is congested, it doesn't matter how good your own connection is. I know from host a web site that high quality hosting can be costly. I used ot have a fixed rate no-quota web site here in Finland, but the ISP was giving great connections to anyone in Finland, but less than 1kB/s to USA (this was a fwe years ago). I moved that site to a US host, because most of the customers are there anyway and everyone was happy. Now I just have to watch the download quota there or it will cost me extra... There's no way I could afford to host videos (using HTTP at least) on that site, but people get very fast downloads because I pay for the bandwidth.

Bluefinz seems to have a good deal with their ISP, if the ISP is not complaining about big & popular video files being transferred all over the world. It could be that bandwidth is cheaper and more abundant than a few years ago.

[sukhdev]

juri, singapore is a bit unique in that there is an intra country very high speed backbone for all the isps here, most isps hook onto the backbone with a minimum of 100mbps, if i'm not wrong the backbone itself is 600mbps.

my original intent with the video was just to share it locally but its staggering how many downloads were done on the 1st day (1000 for the gaastra video).

more to come...