Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

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Removal of WebTorrent is sad, as it's still WIP in actual torrent clients (but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault). So it was removed before it got a chance in an ecosystem that moves slow.

It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs. https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be reuploads, old versions should be separate.

As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and duplicated.

Hi!

Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement Live Streaming with it (available since v3).

> but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault

Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about data streams.

Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this is what webtorrent-desktop uses).

I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.

You have more choices then that for node.js

* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc

* https://github.com/murat-dogan/node-datachannel

If libwebrtc fits your needs you totally should use it! Alternatives have existed for years though

Those are absolutely amazing libraries, thanks for linking! I see that much has changed for the better in the past year.

Perhaps a fork is in order!?

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