3 ms·

It is supported, it’s called web seeding.

• black_puppydog 6y ago
  although from how I understood it, web seeding really assumes you can control the folder structure on the servers. so you can't just curated a data collection from publicly accessible sources and freely map torrent contents to files on http for bootstrapping/reliability. too bad, really. it seems like a cool thing to just make a torrent from e.g. public datasets that are hosted on flimsy university servers. make the torrent, distribute it, the swarm keeps the files available and reduces load on the university servers, and the server keeps the torrent from dying even if the dataset is niche.
  • crest 6y ago
    There are two BEPs for web seeding. One is defined in terms of base URL and relative paths the other in terms of pieces and offsets into them. Few clients implement both web seeding protocol extensions.
  • joshspankit 6y ago
    Check out https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html