A Distributed Media Player and Content Distribution System

Most popular music sharing implementations require powerful centralized servers to keep track of or store the available content. We offer an alternative solution. This paper describes Tempo, a decentralized digital content solution that lets users share their content on the fly as it is being enjoyed. Our system focuses on a community approach to digital media, with multiple content controllers and clients distributing files to other clients while the media plays. The major challenges we faced in this project included efficiently distributing files to an arbitrarily large number of users in a decentralized fashion, allowing multiple users to control media playback, and keeping playback synchronized. We overcome these difficulties by using a BitTorrent-style distribution system, utilizing stateless connections for control messages, and maintaining a synchronized group time for time stamped messages.