dAMP: A JXTA-Based Peer-to-Peer Media Player

Traditional approaches for searching through websites for media files to download, and tracing broken links is a frustrating experience and a time consuming task for end users. This experience can be improved through Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing. The notion of P2P or cooperative computing and resource sharing has been around for quite some time, but it wasn’t utilized until file sharing solutions such as Napster and Gnutella emerged at the forefront of Internet services and opened up possibilities for flexible Web-based file sharing. These file sharing solutions, however, have their own limitations. For example, they still require a lot of manual management by the user. This paper describes the design and implementation of a distributed P2P media player called dAMP that brings about novel ways of discovering, downloading, and playing media files. The dAMP media player provides location transparency by enabling users to share and play media files as though the files are local.