Webtor: Stream torrents online

webtor.io

22 points·dgarceran··6 comments

I just want to point out the lost art of doing this with .rar files.

Multipart rar files are not actually compressed so I heard and if you get the file headers and download them in order then you can stream a video

Torrents and the associated scene frequently still pack things as multipart rar files. (a holdover from even more inferior methods of transporting large files)

Kodi (XBMC) is still the only client I know that does this, since early 2000s

This seems similar to Popcorn Time (https://github.com/butterproject/butter-desktop).

Main difference I see is that Popcorn Time tries to replicate the complete Netflix experience, i.e. displays a catalog of movies and shows you can watch. This thing is just a web torrent client that knows how to download videos in order and start playing them as soon as possible.

So the extension implements a torrent downloader and video player together or it's something more sophisticated? There's no explanation of how it works so I'm curious.

You don't need the extension.

I'm guessing a little bit, but this page almost certainly uses the web torrent project https://webtorrent.io/.

Basically, it's an implementation of the torrent protocol over webrtc.

The majority of torrent clients don't communicate with webrtc clients, but there are some that do (Like the official webtorrent client). So they act as a bridge between web page clients and regular torrent clients.

Does it run inside the browser or does it use a server to get the actual torrent?

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