Realtime streaming from torrents in the browser

[feross]

This is neat, but what we really need is BitTorrent over WebRTC, for actual decentralized BitTorrent in the browser. See http://webtorrent.io

The project's goal is to build a browser BitTorrent client that requires no install (no plugin/extension/etc.) and fully-interoperates with the regular BitTorrent network. We use WebRTC Data Channels for peer-to-peer transport.

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.

WebTorrent is already working as a node.js bittorrent client (just do `npm install webtorrent -g` and use the `webtorrent` command), and as a web-based client (though the docs for this latter part are currently very lacking -- this will improve in the coming days!).

[sktrdie]

Nice! Why not create a different protocol then if they're not yet compatible? Adoption for a browser-based p2p streaming tool should be seamless. If the only problem is BitTorrent integration, go your own way.

ps: your site seems down.

[atmosx]

So (in theory) I can upload this to my server and stream content from torrents straight out (since I'm on lousy ADSL while my VPS sits on ... well a way faster connection)?

If that's what these guys after, that's amazing :-)

[nimbusvid]

I created (and later closed) a similar service using mega.co.nz instead of torrents. The main problem I see with your approach is that you serve video from your server (and presumably do the torrent fetch server side). This opens you up to liability, makes you responsible for DMCA take downs and puts the workload on the server.

In contrast NimbusVid was entirely client side. The drawback was that the source data needed to be a web friendly seekable format; you couldn't play an arbitrary video file.

[higherpurpose]

This one is client-side:

http://www.popcornexpress.me/

It uses Bittorent's Torque plugin.

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2012/07/06/introducing-bittorrent...

Of course at that point you might as well install the real thing, rather than a plugin. It's a shame there isn't a standard web-based torrenting protocol. I imagine it's technically pretty hard to do, but even if it wasn't, now that MPAA is on W3C's board and owns it, and with Google, Microsoft and Apple also being in bed with them, there's slim to zero chance such a protocol will ever become reality.

[jbk]

> The drawback was that the source data needed to be a web friendly seekable format; you couldn't play an arbitrary video file.

Maybe I should revive the VLC web plugin and the torrent input plugin :)

[caractacus]

China is so far ahead of the west in real-time (and live) peer to peer streaming. Look at video systems like QVOD (now dying after state intervention), Xigua, JJVod: they all have a central tracker and use swarms of users to supply realtime video streaming. PopcornTime was a decent example of this but China's been doing it for years - it was live television streaming over p2p first with PPLive, PPS, Sopcast, etc and this then morphed into streaming of films and television. All use a slightly modified version of bittorrent. Most use bittorrent hashes to mark content.

I still can't understand why this has been Bram Cohen's main focus for the last few years and he still doesn't have a working prototype.

[toyg]

> he still doesn't have a working prototype

I suspect he still doesn't have a working prototype he can safely monetize. I don't think the wants to move to China.

[stefan_kendall3]

Guys I just broke into some guy's house that's known to be suuuuuper litigious. Check out all my selfies!

[alkimie2]

Just a couple of not-very-deep comments:

The service did nothing at all on Chrome with ad-block-plus installed.

On Firefox the service did show some very nice blue balls moving from left to right after I did a search on some common video content and selected it, but that was about it.

[0x4139]

http://i.imgur.com/EGQAKbt.png

[TD-Linux]

What could possibly go wrong?

[cantbecool]

Awesome idea, but I don't see how this will last very long. I expect your host will pull the plug in a few days to a week, especially if you're opening yourself up to downloading and then hosting the content.

I run www.moviemagnet.net which surprisingly is hosted in the US, but hasn't been taken down yet.

[IMTDb]

Creator of http://tormovies.org and http://tv.tormovies.org here.

Can I put a "Watch Live" link to iflix.io which would stream the specified torrent (known by it's hash) next to each torrent download button ?

I love the concept, and I think it's wonderful especially for mobile device users...

The only fear I have, as other have noted is that I do really see how you will be able to scale if it takes off, and how you will be motivated to maintain it if it does not :/

Cheers anyway ! :)

[0x4139]

sure thing dude, go ahead :), don't worry this is the least of my concerns, i hope it will take off ^^

[shmerl]

BitTorrent doesn't order file fragments by design. So how can you stream it without downloading the whole thing first (to the server at least)? Which defeats the purpose of streaming really.

[Macuyiko]

You can. BitTorrent doesn't order file fragments by design, but clients can choose to ignore this and request pieces in order. See Popcorn time and many other implementations out there.

[hayksaakian]

You use a client which request fragments in a specific order.

This is not something new.

[lukasm]

In FF: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://ec2-54-68-78-110.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/deta.... This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS.

Chrome Failed to load resource: net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

in p0rn mode just shows the player and nothing is going on.

[0x4139]

cors is enabled but sometimes it just hangs because of the traffic http://i.imgur.com/EGQAKbt.png

[malvosenior]

Haven't got this to work yet. I'd love to see a BT streaming solution not as a centralized service, but as a locally running app. Does such a thing exist?

[derefr]

My personal preferred suggestion: the Bittorrent Channel for Plex[0]. Plex is, effectively, a media indexing, library management, and transcoding daemon, that also provides plug-ins (Channels) to access virtual media items. In this setup, you have a streaming player (e.g. a Roku) and a PC running Plex--you access the torrent through the interface on the media player, and the PC will start downloading and transcoding the torrent and streaming the result to the media player.

[0] https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/102253-rel-bittorrent...

[adrusi]

Not possible currently with web technologies because browsers don't let javascript connect to arbitrary TCP servers. The webtorrent project aims to make torrent clients compatible with WebRTC, so when that gets widespread adoption it should be possible.

[rakoo]

Tribler (http://tribler.org/) does this, but it receives much less publicity.

[0x4139]

the machine is a 10 dollar digital ocean droplet, it's curently at it's peak, this can be packed(and it will be) with node webkit

[arthurcolle]

Popcorn Time?

[m0dest]

Hosed. Getting timeouts for /details. 2 issues in general, though:

(1) The BitTorrent protocol is not hospitable to linear downloading.

(2) Pirated video content is extremely incompatible with browser-based playback... stuff like MKV and AVI containers, DTS/AC3 audio, multiple audio tracks, segmented RAR files.

If this works even for vanilla MP4 content, I will be super impressed - but the browser is the wrong place for this type of media app right now.

[0x4139]

EZTV YIFI and many more don't pack anymore the data inside rar files, and it works, you can watch silicon valley from an EZTV torrent from here http://iflix.io/#/play/ef87a3f97c653d487dece0e6ea8e60b7731a5...

[drdaeman]

Doesn't work for me, even if I allow Facebook CDN. Search works, but then...

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://ec2-54-68-78-110.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/deta.... This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS.

[0x4139]

try again, resized the machine, too many users

[rglullis]

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but has any of these stream-from-torrents-services developed any kind of "magnet link metadata database"? By metadata, I do not mean the common torrent metadata, but some kind of queryable index.

What I have in mind would be some kind of mapping between magnet link and themoviedb (or tvdb, musicbrainz id, etc). Seems like an obvious feature for me...

[benjymau5]

When I can get the page to load (which i assume is due to the HN DDOS of love) i still get "video format or mime type not supported" on Firefox 32.

[jpdelatorre]

There's another service that I use that exactly do the same thing and it works well. http://put.io

[0x4139]

it's not the samething, iflix.io streams almost instantly (if it wasn't for the huge load)

[SimeVidas]

I can confirm that it works in Chrome. (I tried with a Korra episode. It started playing almost instantly, with a few image glitches here and there.)

[atmosx]

For me worked only for 'porn' which had a huge load of seeders. Not for anything meaningful (which doesn't have 2500 seeders...)

[ris]

Nicely done. A(nother) webapp that refuses to do anything unless you allow it to load facebook's javascript.

[0x4139]

it's just react nothing more

[rotub]

Searched and started playing an episode of the Simpsons on my iPhone within a minute. Impressive!