Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC

Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by leeoniya on Saturday March 30, 2013 @11:08AM (#5465599)

any specific reason why it's chrome-only?

http://www.webrtc.org/firefox

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by erbbysam on Saturday March 30, 2013 @11:19AM (#5465628)

As ianlevesque mentioned in the link below, http://peerjs.com/status is a good overview of current state of data channels. As Firefox stabilizes their WebRTC data channel support, I will implement it. Hopefully there will soon be cross-browser support as well for data channels.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by willscott on Saturday March 30, 2013 @11:42AM (#5465701)

Firefox is currently ahead on the data channel, right? They support sending blobs / arrayBuffers directly, while Chrome doesn't yet have a reliable transport or binary data support.

Your example translates the file into a base64 string to send over the unreliable channel, which ends up being a pretty big performance hit compared to a native binary transport.

All of this is to say: WebRTC is getting there, but it's still going to be several months before it's ready for more than demos like this.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by ericz on Saturday March 30, 2013 @01:49PM (#5466097)

It's true that it supports binary / reliable transport already but there are some very annoying not-to-spec issues. As a library developer, if I added code to support it, it would just go to waste because in BugZilla they've already patched but not pushed changes to these issues.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by mtgx on Saturday March 30, 2013 @11:38AM (#5465689)

I think support for WebRTC is still only in Firefox Nightlies, not the stable version, or at least not full support.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by azakai on Saturday March 30, 2013 @02:12PM (#5466177)

I am on firefox nightly, and the website refuses to work. Looks like it does browser detection, not feature detection.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by eksith on Saturday March 30, 2013 @08:55PM (#5467228)

Same here. Pretty sure it's browser detection only.

I wish developers would honestly stop doing that already. Capabilities and stability are far more important than a logo.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by hacliff on Saturday March 30, 2013 @12:54PM (#5465947)

Depending on how they're writing their files; firefox doesn't support persistent file storage last time I checked.

Firefox does have indexeddb, but if you want to do seek operations you're out of luck.

EDIT: To explain more, without seek writing dealing with large files is incredibly expensive, you have to write everything you've got to indexeddb every time you want to modify it.

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by doublec on Sunday March 31, 2013 @01:21AM (#5467806)

The FileHandle API does what you want - read/write access to an IndexedDB file at any location. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/FileHandle

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Re:Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC by RRRA on Saturday March 30, 2013 @12:52PM (#5465941)

it doesn't work for me on chrome 25 on Mint either.

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