Idea for Usenet -> HTTP Service

[nntpjunkie]

As for the streaming idea, I like it. But the stream would have to be compressed and rescaled quite a bit and I'm not sure if any server can do that on the fly, nevermind for multiple users at a time.

Easynews already offers single click streaming however the video is streamed at whatever the original bitrate was that it was encoded at - so I guess to that extent you would need a faster connection to be able to watch the higher bitrate movies obviously

It would also be a useful feature if an "easynews"-type service would offer a choice of several different quality versions of a video -- like KeepVid.com does for Youtube videos-- so a person on a slow connection would not be forced to spend all day long downloading a huge file. If Keepvid can do it, I don't see why Easynews can't do it.

This would be an awesome feature although it would require extensive IOs especially if all content was indexed

[tesco]

Additional stream compression would not be needed, but the obvious limitation is that a person needs to have a fast connection, and download a relatively small video file.

Actually now that I think about it, I can already download faster than I can watch 720p video, so the idea isn't at all far off. I have a 10mbps connection, not sure if that should be considered "fast" or not (at this time).

[zot]

Actually now that I think about it, I can already download faster than I can watch 720p video, so the idea isn't at all far off. I have a 10mbps connection, not sure if that should be considered "fast" or not (at this time).

Of course the defining factor is the video compression. 720p movies with h264 can be compressed to a smaller size than typical DVD-rips w/ xvid encodes. For figuring out streaming video allowances, it probably doesn't help that movie releases are generally compressed to maintain a certain file size rather than stream rate, although I'm kind of glad that the old Scene standard, that everything had to exactly fit on a disk, is gradually being abandoned.

I know that a 1 megabit/sec connection allows you to stream a 350MB 1-hour TV show (or a typical 1-CD-size movie rip) -- but just barely!

So let's say a 10 mbs connection could comfortably stream most any movie that would fit on a (single-layer) DVD-R. (I Can't wait until 100Mbit connections become standard, then we could all stream [uncompressed] Blu-ray and torrent at the same time )