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Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

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Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#41

Post by r00fus »

reeddavid wrote: post #26

Looks like it doesn't work on iOS. What happened to AirDrop? It used to "just work" and now it rarely works. In the last two days I experienced: - Unable to discover devices (a constant AirDrop frustration) - Transferred a video from iPhone to Mac, had to wait for video to be converted first? - Transferred video from (different) iPhone to Mac, transfer repeatedly resulted in a corrupt 0 byte file AirDrop has become t…

Could the latter issue be due to a HVEC codec mismatch? I have an old Mac and it doesn't handle that codec well.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#42

Post by ken »

reeddavid wrote: post #26

Looks like it doesn't work on iOS. What happened to AirDrop? It used to "just work" and now it rarely works. In the last two days I experienced: - Unable to discover devices (a constant AirDrop frustration) - Transferred a video from iPhone to Mac, had to wait for video to be converted first? - Transferred video from (different) iPhone to Mac, transfer repeatedly resulted in a corrupt 0 byte file AirDrop has become t…

I've never gotten AirDrop to work. I wasted a whole day, once, double-checking software versions and hardware capabilities and reading every manual and specification and forum post I could find. It seems to be one of those features that magically works, at some times for some people, and leaves no clue why it doesn't, at other times and for other people.

It sounds like a neat feature. I wish I could use it.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#43

Post by f1refly »

tjohns wrote: post #19
40four wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using Firefox Send recently, I have been really impressed with the simplicity and easy of use. I haven’t tried it, but it is open source and possible to self-host if you so chose. But for the time being it remains free, and you can share up to a generous 2.5 GB if you log in with a Firefox account so I see no reason to put in the effort yet. That being said, Sharedrop seems to be a different use case, only…

Meanwhile, I found the 2.5 GB limit on Firefox Send really frustrating this weekend when I was trying to send 80 GB of raw video files to a friend. :) Turns out there's very few options available for really large P2P file transfers, short of hosting an FTP server.

Very much related to the sister comment that recommended resilio sync, I usually tell people to install the free (but equally good) synthing when I want to transfer very large files in private. I have it running anyways, and it's not too big of a hassle to install for them. It has the added benefit that you can abort and resume the transfer at any point, which is especially useful if you're transferring from some noisy machine that you want to turn off during the night.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#44

Post by MrGilbert »

I'm using "Just an Email" [1] for quite a while now, on a self-hosted server. QR-code generation has been integrated - I simply press "Start" on my computer, scan the QR code with my mobile, and can share links, files and texts in realtime. That's easy enough for my use-case.

[1]: https://github.com/mustakimali/just-an-email

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#45

Post by asiachick »

rapnie wrote: post #21

Firebase is a really attractive service to quickly and easily bring powerful features to any app, but I can't help it.. I feel like I'd be including yet another way for Google to track people. Therefore I avoid any app with Firebase in them, no matter how cool they are. Am I overly suspicious here?

yes, you are. Google has no incentive to spy on Firebase projects because any project using firebase could contain sensitive data and any company that believed Google would spy on the data would not use them so Google would lose market. The same is true for AWS and Azure

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#46

Post by stormdennis »

asiachick wrote: post #45
rapnie wrote: post #21

Firebase is a really attractive service to quickly and easily bring powerful features to any app, but I can't help it.. I feel like I'd be including yet another way for Google to track people. Therefore I avoid any app with Firebase in them, no matter how cool they are. Am I overly suspicious here?

yes, you are. Google has no incentive to spy on Firebase projects because any project using firebase could contain sensitive data and any company that believed Google would spy on the data would not use them so Google would lose market. The same is true for AWS and Azure

But since Google knows that companies believe that they won't spy on them for the reasons you've outlined, then so long as they're real cautious about it...

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#47

Post by asiachick »

Cool project but it's not remotely a clone of AirDrop. AirDrop is one of those things that can only be done by Apple, at least on iOS. I have many apps that have "documents" on iOS. I can select them in the app, pick "Share" and then pick "AirDrop" and send them to my Mac. AFAIK I can't do that through this. I go into those apps, select some files and pick send to Safari and I get an error, Safari doesn't support the files. I go into Safari and pick some file but Safari or iOS doesn't let me browse the files of other apps.

Maybe it's possible to make a native iOS app you could send the files to that would use same WebRTC protocol but going the other way, Mac to iOS device seems impossible. Where as I just tried it via real AirDrop. I choose a file on my Mac in Finder. Picked Share->Airdrop. Selected my iPhone. I was given the option to open the file which then gave me a list of all apps that I could send it to. I picked an app and the app's folders appeared. I chose a folder to save it to and then ran the app to check it worked. It did.

I supposed Mac to iOS you could make your native iOS app the target and then from there select the files and "share" them with other apps on the phone.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#48

Post by OkGoDoIt »

asiachick wrote: post #47

Cool project but it's not remotely a clone of AirDrop. AirDrop is one of those things that can only be done by Apple, at least on iOS. I have many apps that have "documents" on iOS. I can select them in the app, pick "Share" and then pick "AirDrop" and send them to my Mac. AFAIK I can't do that through this. I go into those apps, select some files and pick send to Safari and I get an error, Safari doesn't support the…

Seems like it would be a cool side project to create a minimal iOS app that simply acts as a share target for this. Similarly for android and Windows. That would make it much easier to send. You’d still have to either visit the site or scan the QR code to receive, but making sending smoother would be a dramatic improvement.

AirDrop is one of those things that is truly wonderful in how easily and simply it works, but makes me really annoyed with Apple for not opening it and allowing it to be cross platform. Android had something similar for a while but it barely worked, and Google never put any effort into making an iOS app (which obviously would not have been as good as native, but better than nothing). Bluetooth itself has a function of airdrop-like sharing actually, but it was mainly used for spam and it’s basically nonexistent in modern mobile Bluetooth stacks. Something like AirDrop that truly works well cross-platform but wasn’t easy to spam would be so wonderful.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#49

Post by chabad360 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #14

> "ShareDrop allows you to send files to other devices in the same local network (i.e. devices with the same public IP address)" That's an interesting definition of "same local network". So, this doesn't work for networks not behind NAT? Or for IPv6?

I believe it means same subnet, but it's possible that it only works behind a NAT because it uses an out-of-network service (Firebase) to tell it who's on a single network (i.e. who has the same public IP).

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#50

Post by reeddavid »

r00fus wrote: post #41
reeddavid wrote: post #26

Looks like it doesn't work on iOS. What happened to AirDrop? It used to "just work" and now it rarely works. In the last two days I experienced: - Unable to discover devices (a constant AirDrop frustration) - Transferred a video from iPhone to Mac, had to wait for video to be converted first? - Transferred video from (different) iPhone to Mac, transfer repeatedly resulted in a corrupt 0 byte file AirDrop has become t…

Could the latter issue be due to a HVEC codec mismatch? I have an old Mac and it doesn't handle that codec well.

Yes, I investigated the conversion issue and it seems it's due to HEVC / H.265 video being the default in iOS 11, but not supported in older versions of iOS / OS X. I was transferring to a Mac running OS X 10.13 High Sierra.

I had always thought of AirDrop as a straight file transfer, but that's not the case.

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