By Howard Wen | Diggable

There has been hype growing over the idea of distributing video on the Internet in a vaguely TV-broadcast-like way. "IPTV" is the loose marketing term that's being applied, but the concept comes in more than one form. For example, users can upload their video files to YouTube and Google Video, which will both stream the video on demand, and these sites offer this service at no cost.

Then there's the combined method of distributing video by bittorrent and RSS: The RSS feed announces to a client program the availability of a torrent for a video file requested by the user, whereupon the client then uses bittorrent to fetch it. Some of these clients can also function as media players to play the video once it's been fully downloaded. This is what the Participatory Culture Foundation's pair of programs, DTV and Broadcast Machine, aim to do.

Broadcast Machine covers the production-side of a two-step process: It's a Web site app, written in PHP, for prepping a video file for "broadcast," and initiating, seeding and announcing the torrent link for it. DTV is the front-end that people use to watch the video. And, like a real TV viewing experience, DTV also lets the couch potato "channel surf" through a selection of video that's available to watch.

There are already similar applications which present a video-on-demand scheme by merging bittorrent, RSS and a media player. (Videora is one such popular program.) The goal behind Broadcast Machine and DTV, however, is to encourage the user to create original, high-quality video content and share it with others easily and quickly. These programs have been designed to present an all-in-one package for online video producers.

"If you want to publish a video feed on your Web site, you currently have to cobble together a solution from different Web sites and services. And if you want bittorrent functionality, the tools at your disposal are even narrower," says Holmes Wilson, a co-director of the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation based in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.

The OS X version of DTV turns a Mac computer into an IPTV set.

The PHP code for Broadcast Machine is original, written by the Foundation's programmers, but DTV is a mess of other open source projects brought together under "some glue code," describes Wilson. Basically, it's a mash-up of a video player, an RSS reader, and bittorrent client brought under a single, pretty user interface. Mixing together all this disparate code was the biggest challenge for its developers.

"We got burned trying to use GtkMozEmbed on Win32. It's just nowhere near stable enough for use on Win32," Wilson says of one problem they encountered. "We also got burned trying to integrate VLC in the Mac version [of DTV]. But there have been some improvements to VLC for OS X. That will probably make that a lot easier when we come back to it."

He and his fellow developers could definitely use some outside help. They would especially love for someone to volunteer to work on the GUI for the Linux versions of both programs, which are built with gtk-x11 and Mozilla.

Because they are open source, Broadcast Machine and DTV allow users to modify and extend the capabilities of them. Other programmers outside of the official development team have already customized the Broadcast Machine user interface. (The interface of DTV should also be relatively easy to change, as both programs render most of their interfaces with HTML.)

At the time of this writing, the beta of the Windows and Linux versions of DTV are being prepped for release. (DTV is now only available for OS X.) The forthcoming version of Broadcast Machine will sport a cosmetic make-over and the ability to integrate with iTunes' RSS feeds. For future versions of the two applications beyond, Wilson and his colleagues want to add the ability to directly stream video in a P2P manner.

"We also envision building a system for DTV that will let people write plugins for things like other file transfer methods, other search engines, CD/DVD burning, and lots more," Wilson says.

He acknowledges the medley of applications available to the user for "broadcasting" video on the Internet, but believes that the Participatory Culture Foundations' Broadcast Machine and DTV will ultimately prove to be a more appealing choice:

"We think people will use DTV because it's simple; it's ideally suited to video; it works great for discovering and downloading legal content, and -- unlike Videora -- you get an un-crippled application for free."

Howard Wen writes frequently for O'Reilly Network and OSDir.com, and has contributed to MAKE, Salon.com, Wired, and Playboy.com.