21–30 of 149 posts
> In order to support WebRTC's connection model, we made a few changes to the tracker protocol. Therefore, a browser-based WebTorrent client or "web peer" can only connect to other clients that support WebTorrent/WebRTC.
TLDR: it can't connect to normal trackers without a bridge
Besides being an amazing technical achievement, I find this very interesting legally, as it further blurs the line between passively viewing content hosted somewhere and redistributing/actively sharing content. Have there already been cases of websites making their visitors unwitting peers, similar to e.g. JavaScript cryptocurrency mining?
The vast majority of these P2P web projects, including WebTorrent, is actually using proxy servers to fake the illusion of P2P connectivity (to be specific, they are using TURN servers to proxy traffic).
Here's a stackoverflow question I asked about this and burned a 100 bounty on it with no answers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70624649/webrtc-fails-to...
This is beside the point but I really, really hate when services write their home/about/faq pages in this style.
Not only do you suffer the ads, you unwittingly contribute your resources (power and bandwidth) to propagating them
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once thought about using webtorrents on a video on-demand site that I was hosting. The idea would've been that I'd have the video available on the server both through HTTP and BitTorrent, and when a lot of people start watching the same VOD at the same time, they'd help seed it to each other and reduce the burden on the server. Never actually made it since the server that I had was actually good enough to serve peo…
Checkout PeerTube https://joinpeertube.org/
WebTorrent Desktop 0.23 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23877912 - July 2020 (36 comments)
Show HN: WebTorrent Desktop 0.22.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856223 - July 2020 (2 comments)
Libtorrent adds support for the WebTorrent protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818659 - July 2020 (87 comments)
Libtorrent adds support for the WebTorrent protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775267 - July 2020 (1 comment)
Learn WebTorrent and WebRTC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23365708 - May 2020 (6 comments)
Dweb: Building a Resilient Web with WebTorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858555 - Aug 2018 (22 comments)
Nile.js – A Peer-to-Peer Live Video Streaming Library built on WebTorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443968 - May 2017 (20 comments)
Show HN: WebTorrent CDN with graceful degradation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14303618 - May 2017 (6 comments)
Instant.io – Streaming file transfer over WebTorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12526717 - Sept 2016 (67 comments)
Product clones using WebTorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12510479 - Sept 2016 (7 comments)
WebTorrent Desktop – Open source streaming torrent client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442116 - April 2016 (80 comments)
WebTorrent – BitTorrent over WebRTC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921773 - Jan 2016 (94 comments)
Webtorrent – BitTorrent over WebRTC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10607747 - Nov 2015 (108 comments)
Instant.io – Streaming file transfer over WebTorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569315 - May 2015 (40 comments)
Node and Browser BitTorrent Client (JavaScript+WebRTC) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336472 - April 2015 (2 comments)
Instant.io: End to end browser based web torrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317714 - Sept 2014 (2 comments)
WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317441 - Sept 2014 (83 comments)
P2P connections over the web are usually not possible due to typical consumer router configurations and bad decisions in the design of WebRTC protocol. The vast majority of these P2P web projects, including WebTorrent, is actually using proxy servers to fake the illusion of P2P connectivity (to be specific, they are using TURN servers to proxy traffic). Here's a stackoverflow question I asked about this and burned a…
In 2017 appear.in published some numbers. They saw ~15% were not able to do P2P. https://medium.com/@fippo/what-kind-of-turn-server-is-being-...
Reading your stackoverflow link my guess is that you aren't using STUN. A P2P connection can't be established without a NAT hole punch.
Also if possible I would avoid the terms `Full-cone NAT` and `Symmetric NAT` they don't do a good job of describing what is actually happening. NAT Mapping/NAT Filtering is the best way to describe it. I wrote a little bit about it here [0]. To see what type of NAT you have try stun-nat-behaviour[1]
[0] https://webrtcforthecurious.com/docs/03-connecting/#nat-mapp...
[1] https://github.com/pion/stun/tree/master/cmd/stun-nat-behavi...