from Hacker News

Peerfetch – Peer-to-Peer HTTP over WebRTC

by Vt71fcAqt7 on 8/2/24, 2:44 AM with 73 comments

  • by tarasglek on 8/2/24, 6:12 AM

    Doing http over webrtc is how https://camect.com works to let one access cameras own private server via their ui. They have a centralized bit for auth and then use webrtc and a physical nvr to serve your videos maximally efficiently...so there is low risk of their cloud becoming a financial burden that they cancel ala google nest cams

    It's a super nice architecture

  • by sitkack on 8/2/24, 6:06 AM

  • by robertclaus on 8/2/24, 4:17 AM

    Clever idea. Begs the question of why you would use http if you already have a bidirectional webRTC connection, but I guess it depends on the application.
  • by meiraleal on 8/2/24, 2:14 PM

    It is really annoying when someone posts an interesting project and HN has a big discussion but when I get to try to lib, it is unmaintained and the last update was 3 years ago.

    There were great recommendations in this thread tho, thanks a lot! This one looks good: https://github.com/subins2000/p2pt

  • by whitehexagon on 8/2/24, 5:40 AM

    Is there a way to do this without the signaling server?
  • by thoronton on 8/2/24, 8:17 AM

    I don't get it. Where is the signaling server and how is it working?
  • by thrdbndndn on 8/2/24, 8:34 AM

    (Aside) speaking of WebRTC, but is there any solution to record videos that is done by webRTC?

    There are already more than enough tools that can record HLS and Dash, but I haven't find anything, not even PoC that can record video streams transited via WebRTC (e.g. agora.io).

  • by chfritz on 8/5/24, 4:25 PM

    Using webrtc is actually overkill in this case. What you really want is just the ICE part used by webrtc to establish a peer-to-peer connection. That's what tailscale does, too. Webrtc then adds a lot of media-related protocols on top of that connection, which, of course, the Peerfetch application doesn't care about.
  • by jiehong on 8/2/24, 9:59 AM

    Nice!

    Although, an alternative is something like Tailscale.

  • by etherdream on 8/2/24, 8:29 AM

    I have tried this idea before, combining Service Worker to implement a decentralized website.
  • by localfirst on 8/2/24, 3:29 PM

    got excited but the repo hasn't been updated for over 3 years.
  • by lerpgame on 8/2/24, 6:42 AM

    its advertising that it’s secure e2e even behind firewall/etc but that’s not true because webrtc will fallback to using TURN server to relay when other methods fail which will break the encryption, just fyi.