Webtorrent clients only connect to other webtorrent clients (unless you put a hybrid client somewhere) which basically are quite less. So its can't connect to normal peers .. well atleast for now
WebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io) is the first torrent client that works in the browser.
It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required. The WebTorrent protocol works just like BitTorrent protocol, except it uses WebRTC instead of TCP/uTP as the transport protocol.
Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer.
webtorrent is not compatible with bittorrent because browsers can't speak raw TCP/UDP as required by the bittorrent protocol. They use webrtc, which is not compatible with existing bittorrent clients and requires some centralized components (signalling servers) while bittorrent can operate fully decentralized.
Also running things in a browser is at cross purposes with torrent long-term availability, large-scale (giga or terabyte) file management, efficient IO and so on.
Is it just me or did WebRTC supporting clients cause a split in the BitTorrent clients?
I come across many torrents that have a lot of seeders on the tracker and WebTorrent (in Brave and as a standalone app) is able to immediately connect to a ton of peers and begin downloading at high speeds while Transmission fails to find any peers even after a long time.
The opposite also often happens, I see lots of seeders on the tracker. WebTorrent fails to connect to any clients while Transmission is able to connect to a ton of peers and download at high speeds.
I observed this for a long time and then I remember reading somewhere that WebTorrent only supports connections over WebRTC and most other clients don't support WebRTC peering.
I have UPnP working just fine. No hole-punching issues in the network.
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.
Sorry, it looks like you're right, there's no browser support yet.
I had always simply assumed that since webtorrent works in the browser, the DHT it uses must also work in the browser, but apparently browser DHT support is still a work in progress: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288
The problem with WebTorrent right now is interop with regular bittorrent clients. As it is, a desktop client cannot seed to a WebTorrent client. greatly reducing the usefulness of it. Hopefully this can be solved.
WebTorrent is a version of the BitTorrent protocol modified to work over WebRTC so that it can work in a browser.
Someone is actively working with the maintainer of libtorrent (popular implementation of BitTorrent) to get support for it into the library: https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123
I don't think you understand how WebTorrent works. WebTorrent in fact works with the regular BitTorrent network if you run it from node, and falls back to use WebRTC when used in the browser.
So you can seed those torrents directly in the browser with something like instant.io.
Problem is: they can't watch movies in their browser because they can only leech from people who are seeding from a webtorrent client.
Let's say I have a movie I want to let other people stream with their browser. I am obligated to use some javascript horror webtorrent-compatible client. If I already have a seedbox running transmission I simply cannot use that for this purpose, which is a shame
webtorrent doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. The most important part, client integration, hasn't occurred anywhere, and the author hasn't even pursued it.
Webtorrent is very nice in web browser. But,i am not convinced why should i use webtorrent outside browser where i can use transmission/aria2/libtorrent based torrent clients.
WebTorrent [1] can be used to run BitTorrent on the web.
It's actually integrated into the Brave browser which is a nice feature. Other browsers might catch on soon.
until every torrent client supports it is not as useful as it could potentially be
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