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Webtorrent – BitTorrent over WebRTC

by rvikmanis on 11/21/15, 7:31 PM with 108 comments

  • by griffinmb on 11/21/15, 9:29 PM

    If anyone feels like testing it out, I was actually just playing with webtorrent a couple days ago: https://stark-springs-9580.herokuapp.com/

    It's very basic, and doesn't have proper error messaging. Would recommend only attempting to stream mp4 (h264) if you're giving it a shot.

  • by chc4 on 11/21/15, 10:03 PM

    I've been using https://instant.io/ a bit to share files with people. You don't have to care about captchas or size thresholds because you aren't storing anything on the server, except for the tracker file. The more people that download and stay on the page, the faster it will be for everyone else too.

    Of course, it's not perfect. It appears to try and load the entire file to memory to seed, which makes sense, but that means you can't transfer a 1GB file without using 1GB of RAM...

  • by anarcat on 11/22/15, 1:45 AM

    this reminds me of http://ipfs.io/ although IPFS doesn't run natively in the browser (it's a go app) and has much wider objectives (ie. the whole web site is loaded from the swarm, not just specific media objects, and it is trackerless, essentially).
  • by jacquesm on 11/21/15, 10:35 PM

    Could a website use this to host/download torrents in the background unknown to the user?
  • by raffomania on 11/21/15, 11:43 PM

    There is a gratipay account for WebTorrent if you want to support them: https://gratipay.com/webtorrent/
  • by vital on 11/21/15, 10:02 PM

    Looking forward to a WebTorrent-based Popcorn-Time app, itself hosted over WebTorrent...
  • by Ir0nMan on 11/22/15, 2:16 AM

    Quite a nice file sharing implementation done here: https://file.pizza/
  • by jd3 on 11/22/15, 1:28 AM

    sort of reminds me of that torrenttornado javascript extension by one of my favorite Mozilla add-on developers

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/torrent-tor...

  • by pepijndevos on 11/22/15, 11:33 AM

    I see one issue here. Who is going to seed? Someone keeping a web page open after they got the download is even less likely that someone keeping their torrent client running after they are done downloading.
  • by ChrisCinelli on 11/21/15, 10:32 PM

    Ferros did a great job with this. Full stop
  • by Fastidious on 11/22/15, 1:05 AM

    Please excuse my ignorance. Is Node required for this to work?
  • by BenoitP on 11/21/15, 9:02 PM

    Server down
  • by J_Darnley on 11/21/15, 9:06 PM

    Why would I ever want to do this in my browser? I cannot think of a larger waste of resources except for pdf.js.
  • by nyan4 on 11/21/15, 11:53 PM

    Browsers are some of the most complex and [therefore] vulnerable applications. Implementing more functionalities into them is really bad for security.
  • by striking on 11/21/15, 9:28 PM

    Reinventing the wheel.

    Rather than restricting what browsers can send and making kludgy workarounds that waste resources, why don't we just allow browsers to send whatever they want?