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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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.

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

Tribler has been around for a long time and it has tons of good research behind it. However, it simply doesn't work. Tried stream a variety of content and it just doesn't show anything unless it's a really healthy torrent which is very rare.

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

I would enthusiastically use this product. Please allow for specifying any BitTorrent file and not just searching Pirate Bay. Kat.ph is much better :)

So, this is a server side solution?

Popcorn Time?

That's close but I want arbitrary BT files, not a hand curated content selection.

You can use peerflix[1] for that, eg:

    peerflix "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44052304ac07aa461b4828c63c52a44f34df2ce7&dn=FIFA.World.Cup.2014.Group.B.Spain.vs.Netherlands.720p.HDTV.x264-&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337"

And then watch at http://localhost:8888 with your favorite player.

[1] https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix

In PopcornTime, you can drag and drop arbitrary BT files.

This doesn't seem to work in the latest version.

If you're referring to Time 4 Popcorn, that's not it. It's also malware.

There are now several forks with different features.

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