How it works

Tutturu is a physical tool making up an infrastructure used for non-hierarchic exchange of cultural assets (mainly in audio/ video form). Connected to the intenret, it provides a platform to exchange them directly between the author or the publisher and audience, who in this setup are able to act as co-authors of a work and re-distribute it further on re-mix basis.

This sharingoriented cooperation method is based on a direct contact amongst participants and on the inherent possibility to modify the received communications. The Tutturu tool can be treated as a TV transmitter and receiver, able to transmit about 2 hours of video recordings an receiving about five hours a day from people worldwide. The tool is based entirely on freeware, unrestricted with patents or technology ownership.

The distribution relies on a combination of broadcathing and podcasting, i.e. syndication of metadata relating to media and torrents, which are subsequently downloaded to the local disc and sent to other users. Thus Tutturu is primarily a method for creating self-organizing networks of exchange functioning beyond institutional frames, in which everybody participates on the same conditions.

The device itself consists of a software appliance based on the Ubuntu server (via turnkeylinux lamp), that is providing a shared folder in the local network from where content is being encoded, seeded and published on remote web site. Its administration is done via web interface build on top of drupal and webmin panel. Other parts of infrastructure include publication website (drupal) and separate tracker (currently being integrated into drupal module).

Basic schema of the process:

  1. a file is being copied into a local folder over samba
  2. drupal picks up the file (via media mover)
    • extraction of metadata
    • encoding (ffmpeg)
    • generation of a torrent out of the original media (just a basic shell script)
    • copy torrent +move original file to a local directory for seeding
    • send encoded file + torrent to a remote drupal site
    • publish all media on the local site (kind of video archive)
    • local torrent client picks up media for seeding from watch folder
    • local drupal site sends all media via ftp to remote site and torrents to tracker
    • remote site picks up the media, and publish it as both a torrent podcast and “web video”
  3. remote tracker pickup torrents from its local folder and starts to track it
  4. remote client (audience) download media via podcast client (miro) or bittorent (deluge with flexrss)

Please note, it is currently not ready for general usage: the basic prototype works, but it is very rough in configuration and usage, if you are interested in hacking it, tar package on top of lamp stack is available on per request basis (contact)
Code components:

It is intended for sharing source material (usually licensed on a Creative Commons license) among artists and journalists. There might be other use scenarios of that system (say piracy) but first of all it is planed as a box installed in “free-culture” multimedia studio.