VLC may add Bittorrent streaming support

VLC is perhaps the world's most popular after-market media player in the world and it could soon be breaking new ground by becoming the first to support the streaming of torrent files. Think you could code such a feature? A few fans of the software are offering $10,000 to the person who can.

As it stands, VideoLAN – the team behind the player's development – has said that if the code was right, they'd be more than happy to add a BitTorrent module to the player and this is what led the fans of the series to pool their resources to get it done.

If this feature was added, then it would make quite a difference to users around the world, since they wouldn't have to download the files before watching, they could simply stream straight from the magnet link. This may however mean that the number of seeds for media files are reduced, as the downloader may be more likely to delete the file after viewing since by the time the file has been fully downloaded, they've already watched it all.

That said, it would still be cool, so if you have the skillset required, head over to the Elance page for the project here. According to its blurb, if you want to apply, “The developer should submit a working patch for VLC that lets a user open a torrent file or ‘magnet link’ in VLC, and start watching any media files within VLC after a minimal delay.”

The challenge for the whole thing is that the torrent would need to prioritise data close to the play position in the VLC player, something that torrents don't traditionally do.

KitGuru Says: This would be pretty cool for watching – achem – completely legal movies and the like.

[Thanks TorrentFreak]

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