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Comment by nimbusvid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

" there's slim to zero chance such a protocol will ever become reality."

Even if you think that, I don't think you should say it out loud. Lots of great things were created because people were dumb and tried to do the impossible. There's too much gloom and doom and I think that's putting people off. Not to say that we shouldn't highlight the issue, just more in a positive light i.e "X is really tough, but if it's done this could change the Y landscape"

Merely my opinion, of course.

I am building a browser-based bittorrent client. Check it out: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

WebTorrent makes BitTorrent work in the browser using WebRTC. It's designed to match the BitTorrent protocol as closely as possible, so when the time comes, existing BitTorrent clients can easily add support for this extension and peer with web-based torrent clients.

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 -- working on it!).

Torque is an absolute piece of steaming manure imo. A torrent client running any time you start your browser with no GUI? how many torrents are seeding? when does it start / stop? What's the bandwidth throughput how do i turn it off?

One thing that's good that came from torque though is BitTorrent's RPC api (originally known as BtApp.js) , which I reverse-engineerd (Since it's some of the messiest JS code ever) into DuckieTorrent, it works just by passing your browser's torrent tasks to your already existing torrent client: http://github.com/SchizoDuckie/DuckieTorrent/

> 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 :)

i was thinking about using the vlc web plugin :) for avi/vmw

Please report bugs :)

Plugins aren't a great solution, people don't want to install them.

I agree very much, which is why I did not push too much the VLC web plugin. Yet I don't know how to solve this problem, in any another way.

On the other hand, Popcorntime and other soft are getting installed by users, so maybe if plugins are easy to install, maybe they could work... (?)

Popcorntime doesn't open up my browser to security holes for every website I visit.

Every plugin you install increases the surface area for attacks.

Of course. But plugins are now in separated processes and plugins shouldn't autoplay (a contrario from flash).

The "right" way to solve it is for everyone to use seekable MP4 (or seekable WebM), especially since things like Chromecast don't natively support anything else. That's hard to do but possible if you provide a highly desirable service (people will start to complain for torrents in unsupported formats).

WebM and mkv are the same container format.

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