[zeptomu]

> In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced.

That's just not true - VLC has many more features than all the web-based (or "app"-based) popular streaming players. Granted, I checked and my VLC does not have "thumbnail scrubbing", but although that is nice, I don't think this is a big deal and if it's really popular, it will be added to VLC (or it may already be there, I did not check).

[JohnBooty]

I'm a big fan of torrents and would prefer them to streams! I'm a bit of a data hoarder. But there are clear reasons why Netflix et al don't simply have you downloading massive files. It would definitely be simpler, but that doesn't mean it's an adequate engineering choice. Lot of smart people working there and they don't jump through all those extra hoops just for fun.

1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files)

That's the way it was designed to work. Otherwise, the bits at the beginning of the file would be much more common amongst your non-seeding peers and the bits at the end would be much rarer amongst your non-seeding peers. Your downloads would start crazy fast and would get progressively slower.

Some clients let you abuse the protocol and "stream" torrents sequentially, but if significant percentages of torrenters (such as literally every Netflix user, in an imaginary world where Netflix simply served everything via torrents) did that it would be an issue.

That's a great way to deliver big files in their entirety via P2P, but that is pretty much the pathological opposite of what is requred for streaming.

For streaming you obviously need that sequential access. You need to optimize for the beginning of the file, since people want to start watching right away. People do not want to wait 60 or 30 or even 10 seconds for a YouTube vid to start streaming.

2. Think about your actual viewing habits. How many times have you watched the first 1% of a video on YouTube or Netflix, and then decided to watch something else instead? Even if we (probably generously) assume most users watch an average of 50% of a given video (I suspect it's much less) that's still 2x wasted bandwidth per video, on average, if video providers blasted out entire files. Netflix's infrastructure (or rather, their AWS monthly bill) is massive already. Imagine it being asked to blast out 2 or 5 or 10x as much data per video as it's already doing.

3. There's also the rather important matter of many (most?) playback devices not having huge gobs of local storage with which to hold complete movie downloads. I've got probably 20TB of hard drives scattered around this place, but that's not the norm.

4. Can't adapt to changing bandwidth conditions by scaling video quality up and down midstream. Personally, I wish I had more control over this as a customer, as sometimes I'd rather just wait than watch a compromised stream, but Average Joe is not going to want to muck around with that sort of choice, or even understand what it means.

[butteroverflow]

Of course you can. Every modern BitTorrent client allows you to download file pieces by their order. IIRC it has been a solved problem for at least 8 years.

[paulddraper]

> You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete.

That's just not true.

I've used uTorrent, and I recall deciding whether I wanted to stream or not. It worked well too.

[zzo38computer]

"You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete." Doesn't it depend on the file format in use? Some file formats are streamable, and in that case if the file is being downloaded in order then presumably it can be played (assuming the torrent software stores the file in a streamable way, and the playback software is capable of working with a file that is not yet complete but will get filled up over time).

(In the case of ZIP archives, 7-Zip can't open partial files, but bsdtar can. Although in my case it was from a damaged floppy disk rather than torrent, but the same thing would do, if you are downloading ZIP files from torrent. But if you are downloading music, then presumably bsdtar is irrelevant.)

[jayjader]

> 1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files)

Theoretically, yes. But in practice, especially with "modern"/high-speed internet, I can open my torrent in VLC after the first few MB are present on my computer and read the entire file as it comes in, without me the user encountering stuttering or buffering of any kind.

In effect, from the user's perspective, you're streaming the torrent - without running into the often present decrease in quality from the "traditional" stream's encoding.