"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)"<p><a href="https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/" rel="nofollow">https://botbot.me/freenode/webtorrent/2014-09-11/</a><p>(wasn't obvious to me what this was...)
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.
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.<p>Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.
While that's a neat tech toy I don't think the browser is a good platform for a torrent client.<p>A significant drawback is that you'll have to keep a tab open for seeding. And no DHT support either.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://pwmckenna.com/2012/06/29/making-of-paddle-over.html" rel="nofollow">http://pwmckenna.com/2012/06/29/making-of-paddle-over.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://btappjs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://btappjs.com/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I can't get it to work, hope this helps:<p>Firefox 32:<p>ICE failed, see about:webrtc for more details<p>Nightly 35a1:<p>Mandatory/optional in createOffer options is deprecated! Use {} instead (note the case difference)!<p>setLocalDescription called without success/failure callbacks. This is deprecated, and will be an error in the future.<p>ICE failed, see about:webrtc for more details<p>this._pc is null bundle.js:25705<p>Chrome 37:<p>Uncaught, unspecified "error" event. bundle.js:9134
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.<p>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.