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Comment by lossolo | Hacker News Reader

Adoption of webtorrent (bittorrent via webrtc) is almost non-existent. Unless uTorrent and libtorrent (used by Deluge, rtorrent, qbittorrent etc) will adopt this, then webtorrent in browser will never start off. Unfortunately i predict that this desktop client will not resolve this issue.

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That's not true. Vuze already supports WebTorrent! Check it out: https://wiki.vuze.com/w/WebTorrent

There's also built-in support for WebTorrent (and IPFS for that matter) in the Playback video player: https://mafintosh.github.io/playback/

What i wrote is true. You know how much of market is Vuze comparing to utorrent and libtorrent?

EDIT: Here you go, data from 2015

http://lifehacker.com/5813348/five-best-bittorrent-applicati...

Azureus was something but 10 years ago. Things changed.

uTorrent shows banner ads and recently shipped with bitcoin mining malware. It's also a lot more work--and requires a second program, like VLC--to do streaming.

I'm optimistic about WebTorrent Desktop adoption.

You're right that we need lots more hybrid client adoption to bridge the BitTorrent and WebTorrent networks and really make it work in the browser.

I hope WebTorrent Desktop can be that client.

Finally, libtorrent is open source. Here's the discussion about adding WebTorrent support: https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/223

It dosen't matter that they show banners. They are number 1 anyway. Telemetry didn't change windows adoption and ads didn't change utorrent adoption. I know about this issue from 14 october :)

I am not so optimistic, this client has 15-30 times more ram usage and couple of times more CPU usage. You can just install qBittorrent set sequential downloading and watch the movie..

Yes it matters. Ads if downloaded from Internet at start time will definitely introduce anonimity/privacy issues and cut user base by large. utorrent is #1 only because older versions (no adds/malware) are easily accessible.

I feel this is a moot point.

I'm pretty sure the install base of WebRTC data channels is far higher than BitTorrent (Chrome, Firefox, Opera and soon Edge and Safari), so existing Torrent clients providing support only helps out the existing torrents out there.

Down the line I'm willing to bet that WebTorrent grows to be more widely used than BitTorrent, just off of the lack of friction to get started for both users and developers.

Agreed, moot point. All it would take are a few large companies to hoist its downloads through this platform and provide the initial seed pool...

First candidate: Blizzard!

You know that you can't connect to normal bittorrent clients from webtorrent in browser right? Which means that you do not have almost any sources of seeders, which means that webrtc adoption dosen't matter.

I know you can't connect to normal clients. My point is normal clients don't really matter.

"Which means that you do not have almost any sources of seeders"

All it takes for someone to seed a file is to open a web page. Think about it.

At any point if I wanted to promote a song via WebTorrent, I could build WebTorrent into an audio player and encourage my user base to click a checkbox and seed the track (toss in IndexedDB support for storing it offline and it's even better).

Complete serverless resharing with almost every benefit of BitTorrent to boot.

The only thing WebTorrent needs the existing BitTorrent install base for is the existing torrents, which don't matter as much as you might think they do (most torrents are pirated content anyways).

So yes, WebRTC adoption does matter.

> All it takes for someone to seed a file is to open a web page. Think about it.

That's a pretty big hurdle considering most regular torrent users don't even realize WebTorrent exists, and these users contribute the vast majority of the content available on BitTorrent.

Of course in the ideal world where WebTorrent has significant market share, this wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. But I agree with lossolo that without interop with libtorrent at the very least (if not uTorrent as well), that ideal world is probably never going to come into existence.

"That's a pretty big hurdle considering most regular torrent users don't even realize WebTorrent exists"

They don't need to. That's the point.

If I send a user to https://file.pizza/ to transfer a file to them. Not once to I have to mention that it uses WebTorrent. IMO that's the killer feature.

Yes, WebTorrent enables plenty of really great, novel use cases for BitTorrent technology, but it will remain a second-rate BitTorrent client in the eyes of most existing BitTorrent users without great interop. Although I personally do like these new WebTorrent-based web services, there's no guarantee that any of them will ever reach critical mass in terms of adoption, whereas BitTorrent itself has long since reached critical mass. To say that "normal clients don't really matter" simply because WebTorrent can enable new use cases for BitTorrent (that haven't shown any significant traction) really seems like you're missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

> To say that "normal clients don't really matter" simply because WebTorrent can enable new use cases for BitTorrent (that haven't shown any significant traction) really seems like you're missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

I already said "the forest" doesn't matter.

Seriously, if I were building something with WebTorrent. Let's say Netflix (Note: https://torrentfreak.com/webtorrent-brings-bittorrent-to-the...). And most of the existing BitTorrent seeds are pirated content.

Why would I care?

"there's no guarantee that any of them will ever reach critical mass in terms of adoption"

When you give away tool with a widespread guaranteed userbase like this, someone is bound to build something that people will use. Not to say WebTorrent will be this big, but that's how the internet came to be.

And this is a completely decentralized upload and download library for the web, someone's going to build something popular with it I'm sure and it's not even at version 1.0 yet.

Seems like a no-brainer for TPB/etc to adopt WebTorrent. That should get the momentum going.

If this what you wrote was true then you would see big adoption of webtorrent which is not the case. As i said before and i am saying for almost 2 years now. I love webtorrent but it NEEDS support from libtorrent and utorrent. Look at biggest bittorrent sites and on private trackers, i have seen private data on clients usage and i can tell you that adoption is almost non-existent comparing to big 5, which still means that webrtc dosen't matter in this case..

"If this what you wrote was true then you would see big adoption of webtorrent which is not the case."

You're missing the point.

Think of it this way.

Check out this video: https://fastcast.nz/videos/cityscape-chicago-ii.html

Once you're done viewing even a second of it, just know you've just adopted WebTorrent.

You don't even need to know WebTorrent exists or was used and BitTorrent wasn't needed in any way.

You know there is one peer only on server side, right? Which means they could just setup nginx and everything would be the same.

I looked into the complexity of implementing webtorrent (which is just websocket signaling and webrtc data channel connections to peers rather than the traditional http signaling with udp to peers) in libtorrent and it is kind of a giant mess of C++ :p

The problem is more that every desktop client, for some reason, has also reimplemented bittorrent. Specifically, Transmission, Deluge, and KTorrent all use their own bittorrent protocol implementations, and none of them are particularly or easily extensible enough to provide webtorrent support easily.

But let it be known eyes are on the prize and have at least looked into it, it is just a hard problem, exacerbated by implementation fragmentation.

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