4 ms·
Those services are for the initial peer discovery and SDP exchange, which can be done by other means (using any other side-channel). Ongoing work is happening,
by padenot 9y ago
Those services are for the initial peer discovery and SDP exchange, which can be done by other means (using any other side-channel).
Ongoing work is happening, for example by the webtorrent folks, to remove this constraint.
- AndrewDucker 9y agoYeah, it's initial peer discovery and connection setup (if behind NAT) I'm talking about. Once you've found the other PC and got a connection set up then all is well ;-) Do these services also act as connectors in case of double NAT?
- padenot 9y agoThey certainly can, I don't know if they do in practice. It always work for me, so I haven't investigated too much.
- TD-Linux 9y agoSTUN allows all sorts of hole-punching for cases where both peers are behind NATs. For cases where the hole-punching doesn't work (a user behind two NATs might be one case), you can use TURN which is a dumb UDP or TCP relay.
- rakoo 9y agoThey're also needed for the actual javascript code that runs everything.
- the8472 9y agoWhich is a step backwards compared to bittorrent, since that can also provide decentralized hole punching, bootstrapping and peer discovery and not just the bulk data transfer. Plus being implemented at the TCP/UDP level allows more fine-grained control over the data flow, making it more friendly towards the network.