I don't navigate any dark alleys in order to perform piracy. I pay a service to host/run torrents, and I browse the available torrents through their associated torrent aggregator.
The only danger involved here is in the actual downloaded content. There have been a few codec/filetype vulns for video files in the past, sure, but one that deploys through the browser through a local Plex instance would be pretty interesting, to say the least.
Aside from the nontrivial security mechanisms that would be required to implement it safely, is there another reason why native browser support for torrenting doesn't exist yet?
Super cool. It would be really awesome to get this in the web browser as well. I would love to have access to my music/movie collection on anything with a browser. You also wouldn't need to worry about setting up DNS/Public IP for the host.
github.com/anacrolix/torrent supports WebTorrent so it shouldn't be that hard.
Hi HN! This is a demo of using Torrents in the browser to distribute a movie to a large audience with minimum infrastructure costs. I'm planning to offer this as a service and wanted to gauge the initial reactions with this quick demo. The demo is of a Creative Commons movie, fittingly TPB: AFK, being distributed P2P via Torrent, with an initial seed from a HTTPS web server.
"browser makers have literally no leverage on rights holders."
Yes they do. They could implement a torrent client directly in the browser, and add a few torrent search engines to the standard search engines, so that searching and streaming a torrent becomes as easy as searching and streaming a youtube video.
I like that strain of thought with making it more easy for users to download stuff. But the problem with repositories is, that they are requiring a specific intent of the user to do something.
Let me try to contribute to the discussion with a few unrelated thoughts with the hope that some others are willing to share their own too.
I would love to see is for example an in-browser plug in, that is based on the torrenting idea. Similar to streaming, but just that the cached data is redistributed among those who stream a particular video. It somehow should reach a level, where users have a plausible deniability to not be able to differentiate between legal/illegal anymore and at the same time an implementation that is ideally only depending on an existing widespread standard/plugin.
Another idea would be a physical device that handles torrent downloads, i.e. the VPN connection, encryption of external HDs, and has a super simple and stupid interface to use. There would be lots of opportunities to cooperate with existing VPN providers plus advertising on trackers should be relatively cheap.
Personally I really truly believe that once you can make a torrent client in javascript that runs directly in the browser without any plugins or gateways/tunnels that you will see it explode.
Developers will code it into their download pages, decentralized systems like a p2p wikipedia will be possible and always accessible by anyone with a browser.
So why not just make the video available on torrent?
It's even possible to streamline the experience for torrents like how Popcorntime has done. Users don't need to even be technical enough to understand what torrents are - the same way users don't need to understand tcp/ip to visit a website.
I don't doubt it. Pirated distribution has nothing in the way of hosting cost so I don't see how that would work with decentralized distribution.
What is the set up you are advocating for? People automatically upload content from their streaming apps? How are you going to police amazon/netflix/hulu/whatever service I have to do the uploading in a fair way?
My fire TV has 8GB hdd. I don't know what my chrome cast has but it's less. You need real hardware to store the catalog. Torrenting works because it has a bar to entry.
I'm actually an engineer on the BitTorrent Live product and we definitely hear that desire. While we can't exactly open source the protocol itself, some of the libraries we've developed are currently freely available under permissive licenses.
If you're interested in the tech and want to read some related stuff, we're hosting an engineering blog over at https://blog.btlive.io/.
Every few months, someone builds a site like this. It lasts for a few days (or weeks) at best before it's shutdown due to legal pressure or sheer cost for the owner.
I'm going to ignore the piracy aspect of this site (since I don't support copyright infringement) and just talk about the implementation. This site is connecting to a centralized service to fetch the torrent data. It's not P2P, it's easy to censor, and it likely won't be around for long.
What we really need is a true P2P implementation of BitTorrent in the browser. I'm working on just such a project: WebTorrent (http://webtorrent.io).
WebTorrent is powered by WebRTC, the de-facto standard for connecting two peers in the web browser. It even works in desktop apps (via Electron or NW.js) and mobile apps (via embedding the webrtc.org library).
With WebRTC, we can connect all types of endpoints (desktop, web, mobile) directly and completely P2P. This is the underlying transport that all future P2P protocols should be built upon.
Right now, the primary limitation of WebTorrent in the browser is that you can't just paste in any random magnet uri or .torrent file and have it work. The torrent must be seeded by a WebRTC-capable client, i.e. webtorrent-hybrid (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid) or https://instant.io.
We plan to build a desktop client (soon!) that can connect to normal BitTorrent peers, as well as WebRTC peers. These long-running peers will ensure there's lots of content available in the network that the shorter-running web peers can access.
This is the vision: All torrent clients (desktop, web, mobile) talking directly to each other. If you're interested in learning more about the idea of "WebRTC everywhere", here are some links:
You're right, but then you'd need to programmatically determine the video bitrate in the torrent client, or integrate it with the video player. Either way is a pretty heavyweight solution.
* Rent a cheap server
* Run transmission daemon on it
* SSH into server, port forward 9091
* Connect to localhost:9091 and add torrents that way
* When downloads are done, scp them off to my local network
Con: way too many steps involved
Pro: encrypted to/from my local network
I know this is not nearly the same as Popcorn Time, but it would be nice to automate all this.
While this is true, browsers could benefit from a "bittorrent-lite" implementation. You get the files from a server, but they come with metadata like a .torrent file, which includes hashes for small chunks of the file. Downloads are automatically checked and can resume anywhere. It could all be transparent to the user. Really, it's amazing this isn't the default way to download yet.
The only danger involved here is in the actual downloaded content. There have been a few codec/filetype vulns for video files in the past, sure, but one that deploys through the browser through a local Plex instance would be pretty interesting, to say the least.
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