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

https://twitter.com/feross/status/510443904152653824

by MzHN • 12 years ago

263 83 12 years ago

twitter.com

abdullahkhalids• 12 years ago

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

MzHN2• 12 years ago

Also some further details on the instant.io + whiteboard app

https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/

fragmede• 12 years 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/

(wasn't obvious to me what this was...)

captainmuon6• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Wow, I've never heard of this before. I am using torrent as we speak.

captainmuon6• 12 years 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.

dlxfoo• 12 years ago

you might be interested in torrent-webstorage services such as put.io then.

ccozan• 12 years 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.

aw3c23• 12 years 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.

captainmuon6• 12 years 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.

Ntrails• 12 years ago

Out of interest, could a network provider actually tell the difference between say the data to update warcraft (which at least used to use a torrent style download), and the data through uTorrent of a textbook, and so on.

dewey2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

do they attack you for using btsync between your own PCs?

patrickaljord• 12 years 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.

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

Could you make a 'bridge' somehow between the two (browser extension?)

icebraining3• 12 years ago

For Firefox, probably. I don't think Chrome extensions allow you to use sockets.

EDIT: confirmed: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152875

MzHN2• 12 years ago

WebTorrent is designed to match the BitTorrent protocol as closely as possible, so when the time comes, existing BitTorrent clients can easily add WebRTC support and swarm with web-based torrent clients, "bridging" the web and non-web worlds. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280436

rakoo3• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

uTP isn't really to make torrents run smoother. It's to allow NAT traversal.

Kurtz79• 12 years ago

So it should work with Chrome and Firefox, correct ?

But I though webrtc still needed dedicated servers to punch through NAT ?

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/infrastructure...

ante_annum• 12 years ago

Feross actually gave a talk about this where a lot of these questions got answered.

jacquesm6• 12 years 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.

icebraining3• 12 years ago

This seems like an attempt: http://kyle.graehl.org/coding/2012/12/07/torrent-in-your-bro...

kieranhunt• 12 years ago

Something like this already exists in the form of SyncNet.

http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...

sktrdie2• 12 years 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_Disc...

JulianMorrison• 12 years 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.

return0• 12 years ago

But a hybrid server/P2P system has multiple potential benefits (P2P acting as a CDN for common libraries, sharing live video or simply uploading 'unhostable' content).

daveloyall• 12 years ago

If P2P were a "first-class citizen", the initial handshake wouldn't take longer--it would be faster!

Suppose that my city's newspaper (or TV station) monitored the (socially accepted, widely adopted) P2P networks for reliable mirrors of their own content, then sent each user's browser hrefs to the mirrors, rather than their own site.

The more popular the content, the more likely that your next door neighbor's P2P system can stream it to you.

Since running such software is socially acceptable in this hypothetical future, your P2P software doesn't have to go through the 'discovery' step. One of your hostnames is 1234.main.st.ci.lincoln.ne.us (see http://owen.sj.ca.us/~rk/howto/usdomainname.html) and one of them is mirror5.journalstar.org.ci.lincoln.ne.us. Everybody on Main St already knows your IP address, and if you mirror a lot of content, they might even have an existing active connection... you see where this is going? :)

brador• 12 years ago

I'd be concerned of this becoming an additional security risk. You just know someones gonna find a way to inject malware into it. On a home network it's not a big problem, but on a corp it'll be open season.

UVB-76• 12 years ago

Surely this isn't a problem with checksums/hashes to verify the integrity of the files?

fineIllregister• 12 years ago

A few years back, I saw a proof of concept on PlanetKDE using magnet links in Konqueror to browse. I was unable to find it again.

deno• 12 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20120213102248/http://whilos.blo...

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the video. It worked really well though. You could just open the magnet and drag-and-drop copy the files you wanted, or just open them and they’d start streaming.

rakoo3• 12 years ago

Check this out: https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs

frik• 12 years ago

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

rid2• 12 years 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

[2] http://btappjs.com/

Legogris• 12 years 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

Something that is done purely with cross-browser compatible web technologies is far more interesting and promising.

rid2• 12 years 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

the84724• 12 years 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.

VikingCoder4• 12 years ago

Perhaps you're describing a Browser Extension?

the84724• 12 years 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.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Why doesn't it work with magnets, too?

stevekl• 12 years ago

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

This is REVOLUTIONARY

woah• 12 years ago

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

html5web• 12 years ago

Wow!

u124556• 12 years ago

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

finnn2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Please edit or delete this comment. It's stretching the page.

M2Ys4U2• 12 years 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.

wtracy• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Sounds more like rsync over WebRTC.

diegocr• 12 years 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

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

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