Btapp.js: BitTorrent in the browser

by AndyBaker • 12 years ago

101 29 12 years ago

DieBuche• 12 years ago

This requires the installation of some plugin to actually work. They made it sound like it was JS only.

Touche3• 12 years ago

Thanks, after reading the page I couldn't tell what this even was. Is it a library to do bittorrent in the browser, and if so what is Backbone a dependency for that? Using Backbone makes me think it's a UI, but there's nothing on the page to indicate that.

pconner• 12 years ago

It looks like Backbone is used for the event model

oskarhane• 12 years ago

They are terrible at explaining what it is.

Can I download torrents directly in the browser? Is it an UI to some underlying service? Can I seed with pure JS?

kh_hk• 12 years ago

As far as I know you need a client running (torque, or µTorrent (+ a browser extension?)) and then you can interact with it using btapp.js

Last time I checked there was no torque support for Linux (yet).

I do agree, they are terrible at explaining what they have.

Touche3• 12 years ago

They also don't explain what Torque is.

kiksy• 12 years ago

Exactly this, I thought "torrents in the browser in a js app? Sounds good!" , but itlooks like its a clunky web interface (that you need to install) for a headless torrent client (that you need to install).

nashashmi• 12 years ago

This came up a few months ago on HN under a different name. BTapps is a js torrent library that you can use to integrate into your apps or build something on top of it. But so far I have not been able to figure out how to use it.

jaredsohn• 12 years ago

But so far I have not been able to figure out how to use it.

Have you looked at the tabs on the top of the screen? (Getting started, code snippets, etc.)? There is even a video of live coding with it.

ddalex• 12 years ago

So you need to install the application to make it work. Presumably, they install a HTTP API-driven binary on the system, and then they connect to it from your browser.

Not impressed.

conradev• 12 years ago

This, on the other hand, is much more ambitious:

https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

andrelaszlo• 12 years ago

Transmission had a http interface for a long time already. This seems like something quite similar. If you need to install a plugin or app to make it work it's not 100% "in the browser" imho.

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/WebInterface

STRML• 12 years ago

Bizarrely, their first example app - http://www.paddleover.com - gives us this message:

   We currently only support OS X Lion. 
   Enter your email below and we'll let you know when 
   support is available.

Could there be a more user-hostile useragent detect script?

In any case; it's not a JS app, it's a plugin.

KaiserPro• 12 years ago

Its not a torrent client in the browser, its an overly complex interface API.

Why you wouldn't just use the transmission API is beyond me.

RRRA• 12 years ago

A pluginless distributed P2P over WebRTC would be interesting!

The whole trust could be built client side and the servers used only for handshaking clients. We could then imagine clients that are aware of multiple servers and distribute both the client webApp & server on different URLs and the whole network could somehow connect in a yet to be defined network structure for efficient traversal.

The one part missing is a w3c standard allowing web of trust signing of the packaged webApp, debian keyring style, to be able to host it anywhere and still trust some set of developers.

captainmuon• 12 years ago

Kinda unfortunate that browsers don't allow general socket access.

The browser could ask for permission (and possibly disable access to cookies or saved credentials for this tab), and it would be pretty safe. You can do that with a signed Java applet, and I believe it was possible with Flash and a couple other techniques, but they have all been killed or are on the way out.

Imagine what you could do... Bittorrent clients, something like Popcorn Time, Anonymous P2P, Anonymous instant messaging, Tor in the browser, ... or less nefariously, Mail clients, Mashups, ... all in simple HTML files, hosted anonymously on a free webhoster. You can build awesome stuff, but can't be hold accountable by your domain name, etc..

puts tinfoil hat on The paranoid part of me thinks the restriction is on purpose, to prevent this kind of app in the browser. Apple, Google & co. control the walled gardens of their App stores. They don't control the "open" web, but they have subtly pushed it in a direction where it is very powerful, but has very specific weaknesses.

wmf• 12 years ago

The restriction is on purpose to prevent browsers from becoming botnets.

psykovsky3• 12 years ago

That's the official excuse?

jokoon3• 12 years ago

I agree that there is a very strong risk for DDOS, but I don't see how it would make botnets possible.

malokai• 12 years ago

Here's another app for torrents: http://jstorrent.com. It is a torrent client itself, no outside client needed, though proprietary.

dbbolton• 12 years ago

Did the app get pulled? Right now it's just showing someone's personal homepage: http://i.imgur.com/J8x5TwY.png

13throwaway• 12 years ago

WebRTC torrent (work in progress, not mine.) https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

SchizoDuckie2• 12 years ago

Allright, so I stumbled upon this as well last week, and i'm kinda disappointed with the whole thing. It's unstable at best (Mostly due to the RPC methods failing violently in JQuery), the 'we need torque' popup is annoying and built-in to the source and it requires Backbone, jQuery, underscore and multiple other dependencies before you can use it in your own project.

BtApp.js itself runs on Torque, Bittorent's attempt at a headless version of uTorrent, that provides some browser interactions over the btapp.js api.

The thing is: Torque is kind of a black box. I've installed it and then quickly got rid of it as soon as I noticed it ran an 80mb process in the background of which i couldn't tell if it was downloading torrents or not. A headless torrent client is nice, but not if you can't see what it's doing.

The cool thing about this though it is that the api can connect to uTorrent (v3.3+)/BitTorrent client and that that's completely working in production already (at least on windows systems)

Just last week I've reverse engineered the protocol and made an angular.js implementation of this that removes all the dependencies to backbone and cleans up the code, separating UI-elements from the actual communication service. I've dropped support for Torque though.

Thus, born was DuckieTorrent:

Github:

https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/DuckieTorrent

Live demo:

http://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTorrent/

You can authenticate it to your local uTorrent/Bittorrent account, it'll slurp in and process all information it receives and you can control your torrents, start streaming them via HTML5, even launch your uTorrent's configured player, wether thats the internal one or VLC, no problem.

Btapp.js: BitTorrent in the browser

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