Streaming Playback Buffer Using Piece Deadlines

[slacka]

There is an option in the Pieces plugin to download a torrent in sequence. This is a bad solutions for streaming playback. Using that option is unsocial and not good for the torrent protocol. ​http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Sequential_downloading_is_bad

A better option would be to create a new feature that uses the piece_deadline function to create a streaming buffer. This is discussed here: ​http://code.google.com/p/libtorrent/issues/detail?id=376&sort=-id

The main benefit of using piece deadlines is that the fast peers will be used first, to download those pieces. the sequential download feature will make any peer request happen in sequential order, including the very slow peers. the order in which pieces are requested is not necessarily the order they complete.

The other benefit of piece deadline is that any spare bandwidth, not required to request the deadline pieces, will be used for normal rarest-first downloading.

This could be implemented like the "stream" function in utorrent or the "preview" function in qbittorrent.