Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 88 posts

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

#11

Post by aw3c2 »

captainmuon wrote: post #7
iopq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

You probably used a public torrent which means that you advertised the fact that you downloaded it publically to the world.

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

#12

Post by patrickaljord »

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.

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

#13

Post by jacquesm »

patrickaljord wrote: post #12

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 c…

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

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

#14

Post by jacquesm »

captainmuon wrote: post #7
iopq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Can you scan that letter and post it? That's interesting reading (of course you should redact all the details about your identity).

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

#15

Post by icebraining »

jacquesm wrote: post #13
patrickaljord wrote: post #12

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 c…

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

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

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

#16

Post by MzHN »

jacquesm wrote: post #13
patrickaljord wrote: post #12

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 c…

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

> 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

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

#17

Post by jacquesm »

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.

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

#18

Post by icebraining »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

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.

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

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

#19

Post by kieranhunt »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

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.

Something like this already exists in the form of SyncNet.

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

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

#20

Post by sktrdie »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

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.

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...

Post reply on HN