GoalBit is a peer to peer distribution system, capable of distributing high-bandwidth live-content to all network peers preserving its quality. This project follows a bittorrent-like approach where the stream is decomposed into several flows sent by different peers to each client. In order to meassure the peers perceived quality, it is used the recently proposed PSQA (Pseudo-Subjective Quality Assessment) technology.

Basic Features
1. GoalBit is a software project, which produces free software for video streaming, released under the GNU General Public License.
2. GoalBit runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows.
3. BitTorrent streaming (based on the BitTorrent protocol).
4. Supported input media: File, Video acquisition (DV, webcam), HTTP/MMS/FTP, UDP/RTP Unicast/Multicast, TCP/RTP Unicast, DVD, VCD, SVCD, etc.
5. Various audio and video formats supported (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV, mp3, ogg, wma).
6. Full video delivery network monitoring suite included (the perceived quality at the client side is meassured in real time and automatically)

1. For users
How to Live Broadcast Yourself
Live Broadcast Yourself is the main functionality which provides the user the capability of creating its own video stream. The user can control several aspects of such transmission, such as the content being transmitted, its quality and encoding, the publication method used and the capability of encrypting it. When this funcitionality is working the peer is referred to as a Goalbit Broadcaster peer, with every Goalbit Player working as a client being able to join the generated video stream.

Broadcasting from command line
When someone is making a Live Broadcast Yourself the Goalbit process runs a broadcaster-super-peer type. This peer (process) is capable of producing the chunks of the stream from the source and sharing them with the normal peers. When broadcasting from the command line we are capable of setting up other scenarios, other possible Goalbit networks, depending in our capabilities and needs.

Kad usage: KAD test between two peers
The intention of this article is to show how to run two Goalbit Media Players (one acting as a broadcaster) and connect them through a Kad network. Remember, what Kad in Goalbit does is to keep the information of the existing channels and peers in the network distributed in every peer of it. When trying this simple test that involves a broadcaster and a player many times people don't get to connect them, and when this happens they get a buffering 0% problem. This has to do with which Kad network are they connecting to and its settings. This will be clarified in throughout the rest of this article.

2. For developers:
Cross Compile for Win32
You can compile GoalBit media player in Debian/linux for Microsoft/Windows based systems. The result is a packed installer and the files (dll s and such) unpacked. For this operation mingw32 must be installed.

Compile for Debian
The Goalbit code is based on the VLC code, adding all of its components as VLC modules. The development of VLC is done through Linux systems, and as a consequence Goalbit development too. Note that there may be other matters to solve other than the presented ones in this document when trying to compile for other distribution than Debian.

Compile and run the Goalbit Tracker Developer Version
In a BitTorrent network, the Tracker entity is the one in charge of getting peers in touch with each other. In the case of the Goalbit Tracker Developer Version, broadcasting peers report which stream (channel) they are broadcasting, and other peer types report in which stream they want to participate (on this particular topic more information can be found at the Goalbit architecture article). The Goalbit Tracker Developer Version is an adaptation of the Opentracker source code so as to follow the Goalbit protocol, and can be compiled for both Linux and Microsoft Windows systems.

Goalbit Tracker Professional Version
The Tracker Professional Version plays the role of the Tracker, obviously! The main difference with the Tracker Developer Version is its implementation language, PHP. This offers other facilities mainly because of its coding nature.

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this media player software.