The various pieces that have been under development started to really come together this week for a nice, usable, V1 candidate for the Livepeer testnet and eventual main network release. There is still quite a bit of work ahead to make everything robust, but here’re some updates on the latest development status:
Broadcaster Channels
The Livepeerjs Repo now contains a new player UI that supports Broadcaster Channels. A channel is identified by the broadcaster’s Ethereum address, so this now creates a persistent URL that you can share and make your live streams continuously available.
A hosted version is available at http://media.livepeer.org. DApp version coming soon.
Node Release
The latest Livepeer Node Release contains a number of stability improvements around networking. P2P networking continues to be the major implementation challenge in getting the Livepeer testnet to be more reliable for streams. It’s pretty easy to run a couple of nodes on your local computer or stable network within the office across a few machines, but getting nodes all around the world on different types of networks to actually connect to one another, remain connected, and pass streams around reliably is the big challenge.
We’ve kindly received some help from the libp2p team over at Protocol Labs in working towards a more stable networking stack within Livepeer.
The goal is that someone running a node on the command line can just download a binary, and run livepeer to be connected and interacting with the testnet.
Protocol V1 - The Final Countdown
The end of feature development for the first version of the Livepeer Protocol is in sight. This week we checked off features related to updating the active number of transcoders amongst other parameters after the protocol is live. The main inventive feature left is:
Beyond that there are a number of fixes, implementation details, and security mechanisms, but the protocol is getting close to being ready for audits.
Devcon3 Video Posted
Eric’s presentation from Devcon3, Web3 Goes Live - Livestreaming on the Peer-to-Peer Internet, was made available by the Ethereum Foundation this week. Check it out.