I work on some BitTorrent software and while it's a really cool protocol, it isn't designed to sequentially stream data. Some clients support streaming, but the act of prioritizing sequential chunks of data rather than chunks that are most likely to be unavailable in the future is bad behavior for the collective group of peers.<p>I haven't personally given much thought to solving the problem of streaming, but I am surprised that the WebTorrent FAQ doesn't mention why they didn't take this opportunity to design a protocol that has more suitable trade-offs than BitTorrent. I'm getting mixed messaging; is their goal to connect the BitTorrent network with WebRTC or enable high quality P2P streaming via WebRTC?
I see a lot of points about how this isn't exactly the best practice but I still don't follow why it isn't the best practice.<p>Say you're already running a video sharing site and your servers are serving up all the content to the clients. So, you add your servers as seeders. The client comes in with support for webRTC, requests packets in order, gets your servers as seeders along with a couple other people watching the video and everyone goes along their merry way.<p>The rare portions don't seem to be an issue because your servers are always seeds, always running, and already have the capacity to support all the demand.<p>Is this not a win/win to reduce some bandwidth consumption?
Cool, a little more standalone than <a href="http://file.pizza" rel="nofollow">http://file.pizza</a><p>tests:<p><a href="https://instant.io/#74ce2f164e3d9ec5d5ee72c9aafc0cf5860e3d92" rel="nofollow">https://instant.io/#74ce2f164e3d9ec5d5ee72c9aafc0cf5860e3d92</a><p><a href="https://instant.io/#c241674dc3b257637abfcb08203303fc25de007f" rel="nofollow">https://instant.io/#c241674dc3b257637abfcb08203303fc25de007f</a>
I recently found this service: <a href="https://reep.io" rel="nofollow">https://reep.io</a> which, I believe, uses WebRTC to directly transfer between 2 browsers (they claim that after the initial 'handshake' they are out of the equation). I'm curious how it compares with Instant.io for simple file sharing use cases (example: send my mom a movie of my kids that is too large of a filesize to email, in a manner sufficient for a non-technical person to be able to easily receive, view, and save)
Cool! But be aware WebRTC leaks public IP address for VPN users, and also leaks hashes of device IDs.[0] And in Chrome, it's very hard to block. This is a dangerous mix with talk of torrents :(<p>[0] <a href="https://www.browserleaks.com/webrtc" rel="nofollow">https://www.browserleaks.com/webrtc</a><p>Edit: From feross I get that WebRTC no longer leaks ISP-assigned IPs when using VPNs.