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

Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by patrickaljord on Monday September 15, 2014 @04:41AM (#8317836)

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.

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by rakoo on Monday September 15, 2014 @07:55AM (#8318295)

Nitpick: traditional bittorrent sits on top of TCP. utp, the protocol to make torrents run smoother, does run on UDP, but it's not the official way to do it (although most clients should do it)

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by api on Monday September 15, 2014 @12:30PM (#8319788)

uTP isn't really to make torrents run smoother. It's to allow NAT traversal.

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by rakoo on Monday September 15, 2014 @02:26PM (#8320489)

Actually (again, nitpicking because I love Bittorrent) the reason it was created is to allow smooth day-to-day operations of a computer with a long-running bittorrent client and several other shorter-terms network applications, such as web browsers, chat applications, VoIP softwares, multiplayer games...

The goal is to make sure that bittorrent automatically takes full control of the interface when nobody else is using it, yet quickly gives control to whoever needs it when needed, without manual intervention from the user (the notorious "set speeds to 10% to not slow down your web browsing").

That said, uTP being based on UDP gives the nice side effect that NAT traversal is effectively possible.

http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by vr000m on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:11PM (#8357010)

Yes, this is a typical feature of delay-based congestion control. Especially, when cross-traffic increases the delay because the change in observed queue size.

uTP also implements LEDBAT, which is a scavenger class of congestion control. See CC implementation details: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6817

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by fulafel on Monday September 15, 2014 @02:24PM (#8320467)

uTP was developed to work around bufferbloat-challenged DSL/DOCSIS CPEs, smoother is a reasonable characterization for it. It has since gotten some NAT traversal abilities as a bonus.

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by Kurtz79 on Monday September 15, 2014 @08:01AM (#8318310)

So it should work with Chrome and Firefox, correct ?

But I though webrtc still needed dedicated servers to punch through NAT ?

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/infrastructure...

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by jacquesm on Monday September 15, 2014 @05:01AM (#8317881)

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

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by MzHN on Monday September 15, 2014 @05:13AM (#8317907)

> 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

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by icebraining on Monday September 15, 2014 @05:10AM (#8317900)

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

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Re:WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end by ante_annum on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:57AM (#8325132)

Feross actually gave a talk about this where a lot of these questions got answered.

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