10 ms·

WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

263 points by MzHN 12y ago

abdullahkhalids 12y ago
Github: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent https://github.com/feross/webtorrent
- MzHN 12y ago
  Also some further details on the instant.io + whiteboard app https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/ https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/
fragmede 12y ago
"instant.io: drop a file or files on the browser, it generates a torrent, and you become the first seeder just send the info hash to a friend and they'll download the file from you using the bittorrent protocol -- swarming works (so multiple people can download efficiently)" https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/ https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/ (wasn't obvious to me what this was...)
captainmuon 12y ago
It's nice to see BitTorrent used for file transfers (user to user). Strange that it is still hard to get files from A to B. You can put them on a webserver if you have one, or use dropbox, but the download can only start when the upload is finished. I usually use scp for this, but it only works when one side is not firewalled, and isn't feasible for non-technical people. This one could be really useful. It's sad that BitTorrent is otherwise basically dead (as a way to obtain content). Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something.
- iopq 12y ago
  Wow, I've never heard of this before. I am using torrent as we speak.
  - captainmuon 12y ago
    I have to say, there's only a problem while illegally downloading stuff (tv shows, films, ...) of course. BitTorrent itself is perfectly legal, and I've seriously used it many times to download Linux ISOs and similar. Also technically, it is the uploading that bittorrent does that is illegal. The other day I made the mistake of downloading one of the last How I Met Your Mother episodes via torrent (the first time in years). Two weeks later I had a nice invoice over several hundred Euros in my mailbox :-(, and I know a couple other people to whom happened the same. That's why I wouldn't touch Popcorn Time with a ten feet pole.
    - aw3c2 12y ago
      You probably used a public torrent which means that you advertised the fact that you downloaded it publically to the world.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Can you scan that letter and post it? That's interesting reading (of course you should redact all the details about your identity).
      - captainmuon 12y ago
        I don't have a scanner ready, but it was a pretty standard letter. If you search for "Abmahnung Waldorf Frommer" you should find some cover letters (in German). Waldorf Frommer is one law firm that is well known for sending those letters. It was basically one page explaining that one violated copyright, giving the file name, the date, and the IP address; then a few pages detailing the appropriate laws, explaining how utterly bad piracy is, and telling you how much trouble you are in. Then there was an invoice for a one time "license" for the episode, and the legal fees which were more than the license. Following that, there was a kind of contract you had to sign, agreeing to accept the license, and in case of repeat violation, agree to pay a much higher fee. If I remember correctly, there even was a filled out wire-transfer form you just had to sign and bring to the bank in the end. If you didn't accept their conditions, and refuse to sign, then they would go to court, which is extremely risky. You might get exonerated, or you might have to pay a lot more, so in the end I just payed the few hundred euros. Given that the reason I pirated in the first place was that I'm a student and currently can't really afford to buy the media, its especially frustrating...
- dlxfoo 12y ago
  you might be interested in torrent-webstorage services such as put.io then.
- ccozan 12y ago
  I live in Germany but this is the first time I hear about this. The only rule might be: do not down load content ( music) from Sony/BMG because they actively monitor the biggest torrent sites/downloads and might get a letter from their lawyer ( which you can ignore basically). Movies and music from other labels are relatively safe. I don't download anymore since with 7 euro montly ( two beers) I have Google all access, while spotify is free from mobile.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  > Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something. That's absolutely not true. You can use BitTorrent as much as you like, there is absolutely no danger in doing so. If you commit copyright violations however, you might get caught regardless of how you did it.
  - captainmuon 12y ago
    Well, I thought it was extremely obvious that BitTorrent by itself is perfectly legal, and that it is of course not banned in Germany. Of course you only get an "Abmahnung" if you use it for copyright violations. But that is by far the largest use case. It can hardly be ignored that most people, especially "non-technical" ones, associate BitTorrent only with illegally downloading media. What I wanted to say, is that now - as opposed to a few years ago - the probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via bittorrent has approached ~1.
    - aw3c2 12y ago
      As I said on another comment to you, you better include "public" somehow in your rhetoric. The probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via private bittorrent trackers or on I2P is ~0, not that I would do or advocate such thing.
      - captainmuon 12y ago
        Well, I wouldn't trust private trackers too much, because if I can get access to such a tracker, then the piracy hunters can as well (with private I assume you don't mean really private between friends, but rather trackers you have to register for, or get invited to). I can't comment on I2P because I haven't tried it, I didn't know that it works with decent speed. My point was basically, the old approach of Joe Average Pirate of 1) installing µTorrent and 2) googling for "Big Bang Theory S05E01 torrent" is as good as dead. You're right I was a bit sloppy, but that's moot now since I can't edit my post anymore and will probably continue to be downvoted until the text is completely invisible :-(
  - 12y ago
- dewey 12y ago
  > It's sad that BitTorrent is otherwise basically dead (as a way to obtain content). Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something. That's just plain wrong. Maybe if you are downloading the latest hollywood flick from TPB you'll get a "Abmahnung" but that's about it. It's nowhere near "dead". If you are not using one of the big public trackers you won't have a problem. There are also free templates to fight these letters.
  - solnyshok 12y ago
    do they attack you for using btsync between your own PCs?
    - dewey 12y ago
      Of course not, nobody's attacking anyone for using a protocol. The only group targeted are people downloading certain movies or music where the company owning the content instructed another company to grab the peerlist of said torrent (in this case) and to get the info on the peers so they can send them scary letters extorting money.
patrickaljord 12y ago
This is a very cool project but it is not compatible with current bittorrent clients. It uses webrtc for the transport instead of UDP. In order for it to be compatible with traditional bittorrent clients, those clients would have to implement communication with webtorrent clients, which hopefully shouldn't be too hard, still as of now it won't work with current clients. Still very cool though and I hope traditional clients will implement webtorrent. The other way to make it work would for browsers to implement UDP which some do such as chrome but only as chrome apps.
- rakoo 12y ago
  Nitpick: traditional bittorrent sits on top of TCP. utp, the protocol to make torrents run smoother, does run on UDP, but it's not the official way to do it (although most clients should do it)
  - api 12y ago
    uTP isn't really to make torrents run smoother. It's to allow NAT traversal.
    - fulafel 12y ago
      uTP was developed to work around bufferbloat-challenged DSL/DOCSIS CPEs, smoother is a reasonable characterization for it. It has since gotten some NAT traversal abilities as a bonus.
    - rakoo 12y ago
      Actually (again, nitpicking because I love Bittorrent) the reason it was created is to allow smooth day-to-day operations of a computer with a long-running bittorrent client and several other shorter-terms network applications, such as web browsers, chat applications, VoIP softwares, multiplayer games... The goal is to make sure that bittorrent automatically takes full control of the interface when nobody else is using it, yet quickly gives control to whoever needs it when needed, without manual intervention from the user (the notorious "set speeds to 10% to not slow down your web browsing"). That said, uTP being based on UDP gives the nice side effect that NAT traversal is effectively possible. http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html
jacquesm 12y ago
How hard would it be to make a torrent:// protocol extension that allows web like content to be stored in torrents? Obviously that would only work for static content (unless the creation of such torrents could be used to preserve state) but this seems like an interesting development. Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.
- icebraining 12y ago
  This seems like an attempt: http://kyle.graehl.org/coding/2012/12/07/torrent-in-your-browser.html http://kyle.graehl.org/coding/2012/12/07/torrent-in-your-bro...
- kieranhunt 12y ago
  Something like this already exists in the form of SyncNet. http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web-browser/ http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...
- rakoo 12y ago
  Check this out: https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs
- sktrdie 12y ago
  In terms of accessing small resources (HTML pages), a client-server setup is by far faster than a P2P system. The Web is client-server specifically for this reason. Not to mention that the whole power of a client-server setup is the ability to have clients alter the state of the server. With a P2P system, propagating changes and making sure each peer has the correct copy, requires more time. Check out this paper to learn more about the Web applied to P2P networks [1]. Li, Ruixuan, et al. "WebPeer: A P2P-based System for Publishing and Discovering Web Services." http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~tata/papiers/sellami/P2P_Discovery/01524435.pdf http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~tata/papiers/sellami/P2P_Disc...
  - JulianMorrison 12y ago
    Client-server is faster if the server's upload speed can match the client's download speed, for all clients. Which implies a large, central server.
frik 12y ago
Is the code available on GitHub? I just saw tge demo on my mobile browser.
rid 12y ago
Seems similar to PaddleOver [1] which was developed by Bittorrent inc a few years ago using their Btapp.js [2] library, unfortunately the PaddleOver site has expired and the code base hasn't been updated in a year. It would be interesting to know if the developer looked at btapp.js and if so, why did he decide not to use it? Getting this technology web embeddable will go a long way to start making peer-to-peer a convenient method of downloading content vs directly downloading from a server, there's always going to be further hurdles to overcome with reliability in a case where the swarm lifetime is very short, but seeding with a few servers can help in that situation. If a web app could upload the torrent and data to a server to seed, then replicate it in a few locations it could be a decent DCDN. [1] http://pwmckenna.com/2012/06/29/making-of-paddle-over.html http://pwmckenna.com/2012/06/29/making-of-paddle-over.html [2] http://btappjs.com/ http://btappjs.com/
- Legogris 12y ago
  Btapp.js is just a JavaScript API that acts like an interface to their closed-source, Windows-and-OSX-only browser plugin Torque: https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp/issues/11 https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp/issues/11 Something that is done purely with cross-browser compatible web technologies is far more interesting and promising.
  - rid 12y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, additionally I could only find a Chrome plugin for Torque, which should be compatible with other torrent clients out of the box. However I can definitely see the advantage of using only web technologies. If anyone's interested I found the paddleover example on github: https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/paddleover.com https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/paddleover.com
the8472 12y ago
While that's a neat tech toy I don't think the browser is a good platform for a torrent client. A significant drawback is that you'll have to keep a tab open for seeding. And no DHT support either. BT clients are best operated in a daemon-like fashion with access to system facilities such as inotify, udp and tcp sockets alike and as something that does not compete for CPU time/garbage collection/file descriptors/etc. resources with interactive web browsing.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  Perhaps you're describing a Browser Extension?
  - the8472 12y ago
    What would be the benefit of a native code extension over using a standalone application with some URL handler / file type integration? I don't see the advantage of "do it in the browser" here.
    - tokenizerrr 12y ago
      More accessible, cross platform with little headaches, people will be more likely to trust it than native binaries.
    - VikingCoder 12y ago
      It doesn't need to be a native code extension; that's not what I'm talking about. In Chrome, you can write browser extensions that are essentially off-screen web pages (in simple HTML and JS). Two advantages of "do it in the browser" are, in theory it would run on every platform that browser is installed on with no additional run-time required (like Python or Java), and two, it could run on Chromebooks. Say, in Incognito mode.
      - 12y ago
higherpurpose 12y ago
Why doesn't it work with magnets, too?
stevekl 12y ago
Does it mean we can finally have web-based popcorn time? This is REVOLUTIONARY
- woah 12y ago
  Finally someone who gets it. Ideally, one could run YouTube on a $5 DO droplet.
html5web 12y ago
Wow!
u124556 12y ago
Is the info hash different from a magnet url? can they be translated from one to the other?
- finnn 12y ago
  As i understand it, a magnet URL is a way of transferring an infohash as a URL scheme, so that it works with other programs. For example, the following magnet URL: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e666231c9a34be278f6cfc390099e4084b30e023&dn=The.Giver+2014+720p+REPACK+HDRip.x264+AC3-JYK&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337 contains first the protocol (magnet:) which tells the OS that this is a magnet URL so give it to some app that can handle that. Since it's in URL form it's all broken down into & separated key/value pairs, so next part: xt=urn:btih:e666231c9a34be278f6cfc390099e4084b30e023 is the infohash (actual infohash is e666231c9a34be278f6cfc390099e4084b30e02, the xt is just the key for that value, urn:btih probably means something, google it). The other ones are pretty self-explanatory, the name of the torrent (presumably so the client can display something pretty before it has downloaded the metadata) and some trackers
  - tdoggette 12y ago
    Please edit or delete this comment. It's stretching the page.
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    > urn:btih probably means something, google it It's a Uniform Resource Name (hence "urn"), btih (BitTorrent Info Hash) is the namespace identifier and the rest is the namespace-specific string, the actual infohash.
    - finnn 12y ago
      Thanks
wtracy 12y ago
This looks fantastic for an idea I've been kicking around: Using BitTorrent as a way for clients to upload multi-gigabyte files to a website without using FTP. The idea is to leverage BitTorrent's robustness in the face of random disconnections and reconnections as well as the easy-to-use throttling options that most clients expose. The server would run a special BitTorrent client that never seeds, to prevent malicious users from using the server as a gateway to redistribute content. So, rather than the traditional cloud of people seeding and leeching, the only participants would be one client seeding, and the server leeching. Once the transfer completes, the user could disconnect and the torrent would cease to exist.
- wmf 12y ago
  Sounds more like rsync over WebRTC.
- wmf 12y ago
  Sounds more like rsync over WebRTC.
diegocr 12y ago
I can't get it to work, hope this helps: Firefox 32: ICE failed, see about:webrtc for more details Nightly 35a1: Mandatory/optional in createOffer options is deprecated! Use {} instead (note the case difference)! setLocalDescription called without success/failure callbacks. This is deprecated, and will be an error in the future. ICE failed, see about:webrtc for more details this._pc is null bundle.js:25705 Chrome 37: Uncaught, unspecified "error" event. bundle.js:9134

263 points by MzHN 12y ago

abdullahkhalids 12y ago

Github: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

MzHN 12y ago
Also some further details on the instant.io + whiteboard app https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/ https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/

fragmede 12y ago

"instant.io: drop a file or files on the browser, it generates a torrent, and you become the first seeder just send the info hash to a friend and they'll download the file from you using the bittorrent protocol -- swarming works (so multiple people can download efficiently)" https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/ https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/ (wasn't obvious to me what this was...)

captainmuon 12y ago

It's nice to see BitTorrent used for file transfers (user to user). Strange that it is still hard to get files from A to B. You can put them on a webserver if you have one, or use dropbox, but the download can only start when the upload is finished. I usually use scp for this, but it only works when one side is not firewalled, and isn't feasible for non-technical people. This one could be really useful. It's sad that BitTorrent is otherwise basically dead (as a way to obtain content). Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something.

iopq 12y ago
Wow, I've never heard of this before. I am using torrent as we speak.
- captainmuon 12y ago
  I have to say, there's only a problem while illegally downloading stuff (tv shows, films, ...) of course. BitTorrent itself is perfectly legal, and I've seriously used it many times to download Linux ISOs and similar. Also technically, it is the uploading that bittorrent does that is illegal. The other day I made the mistake of downloading one of the last How I Met Your Mother episodes via torrent (the first time in years). Two weeks later I had a nice invoice over several hundred Euros in my mailbox :-(, and I know a couple other people to whom happened the same. That's why I wouldn't touch Popcorn Time with a ten feet pole.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    You probably used a public torrent which means that you advertised the fact that you downloaded it publically to the world.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Can you scan that letter and post it? That's interesting reading (of course you should redact all the details about your identity).
    - captainmuon 12y ago
      I don't have a scanner ready, but it was a pretty standard letter. If you search for "Abmahnung Waldorf Frommer" you should find some cover letters (in German). Waldorf Frommer is one law firm that is well known for sending those letters. It was basically one page explaining that one violated copyright, giving the file name, the date, and the IP address; then a few pages detailing the appropriate laws, explaining how utterly bad piracy is, and telling you how much trouble you are in. Then there was an invoice for a one time "license" for the episode, and the legal fees which were more than the license. Following that, there was a kind of contract you had to sign, agreeing to accept the license, and in case of repeat violation, agree to pay a much higher fee. If I remember correctly, there even was a filled out wire-transfer form you just had to sign and bring to the bank in the end. If you didn't accept their conditions, and refuse to sign, then they would go to court, which is extremely risky. You might get exonerated, or you might have to pay a lot more, so in the end I just payed the few hundred euros. Given that the reason I pirated in the first place was that I'm a student and currently can't really afford to buy the media, its especially frustrating...
dlxfoo 12y ago
you might be interested in torrent-webstorage services such as put.io then.
ccozan 12y ago
I live in Germany but this is the first time I hear about this. The only rule might be: do not down load content ( music) from Sony/BMG because they actively monitor the biggest torrent sites/downloads and might get a letter from their lawyer ( which you can ignore basically). Movies and music from other labels are relatively safe. I don't download anymore since with 7 euro montly ( two beers) I have Google all access, while spotify is free from mobile.
aw3c2 12y ago
> Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something. That's absolutely not true. You can use BitTorrent as much as you like, there is absolutely no danger in doing so. If you commit copyright violations however, you might get caught regardless of how you did it.
- captainmuon 12y ago
  Well, I thought it was extremely obvious that BitTorrent by itself is perfectly legal, and that it is of course not banned in Germany. Of course you only get an "Abmahnung" if you use it for copyright violations. But that is by far the largest use case. It can hardly be ignored that most people, especially "non-technical" ones, associate BitTorrent only with illegally downloading media. What I wanted to say, is that now - as opposed to a few years ago - the probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via bittorrent has approached ~1.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    As I said on another comment to you, you better include "public" somehow in your rhetoric. The probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via private bittorrent trackers or on I2P is ~0, not that I would do or advocate such thing.
    - captainmuon 12y ago
      Well, I wouldn't trust private trackers too much, because if I can get access to such a tracker, then the piracy hunters can as well (with private I assume you don't mean really private between friends, but rather trackers you have to register for, or get invited to). I can't comment on I2P because I haven't tried it, I didn't know that it works with decent speed. My point was basically, the old approach of Joe Average Pirate of 1) installing µTorrent and 2) googling for "Big Bang Theory S05E01 torrent" is as good as dead. You're right I was a bit sloppy, but that's moot now since I can't edit my post anymore and will probably continue to be downvoted until the text is completely invisible :-(
- 12y ago
dewey 12y ago
> It's sad that BitTorrent is otherwise basically dead (as a way to obtain content). Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something. That's just plain wrong. Maybe if you are downloading the latest hollywood flick from TPB you'll get a "Abmahnung" but that's about it. It's nowhere near "dead". If you are not using one of the big public trackers you won't have a problem. There are also free templates to fight these letters.
- solnyshok 12y ago
  do they attack you for using btsync between your own PCs?
  - dewey 12y ago
    Of course not, nobody's attacking anyone for using a protocol. The only group targeted are people downloading certain movies or music where the company owning the content instructed another company to grab the peerlist of said torrent (in this case) and to get the info on the peers so they can send them scary letters extorting money.

patrickaljord 12y ago

This is a very cool project but it is not compatible with current bittorrent clients. It uses webrtc for the transport instead of UDP. In order for it to be compatible with traditional bittorrent clients, those clients would have to implement communication with webtorrent clients, which hopefully shouldn't be too hard, still as of now it won't work with current clients. Still very cool though and I hope traditional clients will implement webtorrent. The other way to make it work would for browsers to implement UDP which some do such as chrome but only as chrome apps.

rakoo 12y ago
Nitpick: traditional bittorrent sits on top of TCP. utp, the protocol to make torrents run smoother, does run on UDP, but it's not the official way to do it (although most clients should do it)
- api 12y ago
  uTP isn't really to make torrents run smoother. It's to allow NAT traversal.
  - fulafel 12y ago
    uTP was developed to work around bufferbloat-challenged DSL/DOCSIS CPEs, smoother is a reasonable characterization for it. It has since gotten some NAT traversal abilities as a bonus.
  - rakoo 12y ago
    Actually (again, nitpicking because I love Bittorrent) the reason it was created is to allow smooth day-to-day operations of a computer with a long-running bittorrent client and several other shorter-terms network applications, such as web browsers, chat applications, VoIP softwares, multiplayer games... The goal is to make sure that bittorrent automatically takes full control of the interface when nobody else is using it, yet quickly gives control to whoever needs it when needed, without manual intervention from the user (the notorious "set speeds to 10% to not slow down your web browsing"). That said, uTP being based on UDP gives the nice side effect that NAT traversal is effectively possible. http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html

jacquesm 12y ago

How hard would it be to make a torrent:// protocol extension that allows web like content to be stored in torrents? Obviously that would only work for static content (unless the creation of such torrents could be used to preserve state) but this seems like an interesting development. Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.

icebraining 12y ago
This seems like an attempt: http://kyle.graehl.org/coding/2012/12/07/torrent-in-your-browser.html http://kyle.graehl.org/coding/2012/12/07/torrent-in-your-bro...
kieranhunt 12y ago
Something like this already exists in the form of SyncNet. http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web-browser/ http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...
rakoo 12y ago
Check this out: https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs
sktrdie 12y ago
In terms of accessing small resources (HTML pages), a client-server setup is by far faster than a P2P system. The Web is client-server specifically for this reason. Not to mention that the whole power of a client-server setup is the ability to have clients alter the state of the server. With a P2P system, propagating changes and making sure each peer has the correct copy, requires more time. Check out this paper to learn more about the Web applied to P2P networks [1]. Li, Ruixuan, et al. "WebPeer: A P2P-based System for Publishing and Discovering Web Services." http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~tata/papiers/sellami/P2P_Discovery/01524435.pdf http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~tata/papiers/sellami/P2P_Disc...
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  Client-server is faster if the server's upload speed can match the client's download speed, for all clients. Which implies a large, central server.

frik 12y ago

Is the code available on GitHub? I just saw tge demo on my mobile browser.

rid 12y ago

Seems similar to PaddleOver [1] which was developed by Bittorrent inc a few years ago using their Btapp.js [2] library, unfortunately the PaddleOver site has expired and the code base hasn't been updated in a year. It would be interesting to know if the developer looked at btapp.js and if so, why did he decide not to use it? Getting this technology web embeddable will go a long way to start making peer-to-peer a convenient method of downloading content vs directly downloading from a server, there's always going to be further hurdles to overcome with reliability in a case where the swarm lifetime is very short, but seeding with a few servers can help in that situation. If a web app could upload the torrent and data to a server to seed, then replicate it in a few locations it could be a decent DCDN. [1] http://pwmckenna.com/2012/06/29/making-of-paddle-over.html http://pwmckenna.com/2012/06/29/making-of-paddle-over.html [2] http://btappjs.com/ http://btappjs.com/

Legogris 12y ago
Btapp.js is just a JavaScript API that acts like an interface to their closed-source, Windows-and-OSX-only browser plugin Torque: https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp/issues/11 https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp/issues/11 Something that is done purely with cross-browser compatible web technologies is far more interesting and promising.
- rid 12y ago
  Thanks for the clarification, additionally I could only find a Chrome plugin for Torque, which should be compatible with other torrent clients out of the box. However I can definitely see the advantage of using only web technologies. If anyone's interested I found the paddleover example on github: https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/paddleover.com https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/paddleover.com

the8472 12y ago

While that's a neat tech toy I don't think the browser is a good platform for a torrent client. A significant drawback is that you'll have to keep a tab open for seeding. And no DHT support either. BT clients are best operated in a daemon-like fashion with access to system facilities such as inotify, udp and tcp sockets alike and as something that does not compete for CPU time/garbage collection/file descriptors/etc. resources with interactive web browsing.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
VikingCoder 12y ago
Perhaps you're describing a Browser Extension?
- the8472 12y ago
  What would be the benefit of a native code extension over using a standalone application with some URL handler / file type integration? I don't see the advantage of "do it in the browser" here.
  - tokenizerrr 12y ago
    More accessible, cross platform with little headaches, people will be more likely to trust it than native binaries.
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    It doesn't need to be a native code extension; that's not what I'm talking about. In Chrome, you can write browser extensions that are essentially off-screen web pages (in simple HTML and JS). Two advantages of "do it in the browser" are, in theory it would run on every platform that browser is installed on with no additional run-time required (like Python or Java), and two, it could run on Chromebooks. Say, in Incognito mode.
    - 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago

Why doesn't it work with magnets, too?

stevekl 12y ago

Does it mean we can finally have web-based popcorn time? This is REVOLUTIONARY

woah 12y ago
Finally someone who gets it. Ideally, one could run YouTube on a $5 DO droplet.

html5web 12y ago

Wow!

u124556 12y ago

Is the info hash different from a magnet url? can they be translated from one to the other?

finnn 12y ago
As i understand it, a magnet URL is a way of transferring an infohash as a URL scheme, so that it works with other programs. For example, the following magnet URL: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e666231c9a34be278f6cfc390099e4084b30e023&dn=The.Giver+2014+720p+REPACK+HDRip.x264+AC3-JYK&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337 contains first the protocol (magnet:) which tells the OS that this is a magnet URL so give it to some app that can handle that. Since it's in URL form it's all broken down into & separated key/value pairs, so next part: xt=urn:btih:e666231c9a34be278f6cfc390099e4084b30e023 is the infohash (actual infohash is e666231c9a34be278f6cfc390099e4084b30e02, the xt is just the key for that value, urn:btih probably means something, google it). The other ones are pretty self-explanatory, the name of the torrent (presumably so the client can display something pretty before it has downloaded the metadata) and some trackers
- tdoggette 12y ago
  Please edit or delete this comment. It's stretching the page.
- M2Ys4U 12y ago
  > urn:btih probably means something, google it It's a Uniform Resource Name (hence "urn"), btih (BitTorrent Info Hash) is the namespace identifier and the rest is the namespace-specific string, the actual infohash.
  - finnn 12y ago
    Thanks

wtracy 12y ago

This looks fantastic for an idea I've been kicking around: Using BitTorrent as a way for clients to upload multi-gigabyte files to a website without using FTP. The idea is to leverage BitTorrent's robustness in the face of random disconnections and reconnections as well as the easy-to-use throttling options that most clients expose. The server would run a special BitTorrent client that never seeds, to prevent malicious users from using the server as a gateway to redistribute content. So, rather than the traditional cloud of people seeding and leeching, the only participants would be one client seeding, and the server leeching. Once the transfer completes, the user could disconnect and the torrent would cease to exist.

wmf 12y ago
Sounds more like rsync over WebRTC.
wmf 12y ago
Sounds more like rsync over WebRTC.

diegocr 12y ago

I can't get it to work, hope this helps: Firefox 32: ICE failed, see about:webrtc for more details Nightly 35a1: Mandatory/optional in createOffer options is deprecated! Use {} instead (note the case difference)! setLocalDescription called without success/failure callbacks. This is deprecated, and will be an error in the future. ICE failed, see about:webrtc for more details this._pc is null bundle.js:25705 Chrome 37: Uncaught, unspecified "error" event. bundle.js:9134