Electron renderTo

[memeone]

I'm trying to render a torrent to a browser window in electron. I am running webtorrent in the main process and accessing it through a remote. When trying to render to my browserwindow with this code running in the render thread (the browserwindow)

var {remote} = require('electron');
var main = remote.require('./src/index.js');

var ipc = require('electron').ipcRenderer;
var file;

ipc.on('openFile' , function(event , magnet){
	console.log(magnet);
	var torrent = main.webtorrent.get(magnet);
	console.log(torrent);
	file = torrent.files[0];
	file.renderTo('#player')
});

Main thread code:

var WebTorrent = require('webtorrent');
var client = new WebTorrent();
...
exports.openviewer = (magnet) => {
  win_viewer = new BrowserWindow({width: 1280, height: 720});

  win_viewer.loadURL(url.format({
    pathname: path.join(__dirname, '/views/viewer.html'),
    protocol: 'file:',
    slashes: true
  }));

  win_viewer.webContents.on('dom-ready', () => {
    win_viewer.webContents.send('openFile' , magnet);
  });


  win_viewer.on('close', () => {
    win_viewer = null;
  });
  exports.win_viewer = win_viewer;
};

Error emitted in the render thread:

Uncaught Error: Could not call remote function ''. Check that the function signature is correct. Underlying error: browser-only method
Error: Could not call remote function ''. Check that the function signature is correct. Underlying error: browser-only method
    at callFunction (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/electron/dist/resources/electron.asar/browser/rpc-server.js:235:11)
    at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/electron/dist/resources/electron.asar/browser/rpc-server.js:342:5)
    at emitMany (events.js:127:13)
    at EventEmitter.emit (events.js:201:7)
    at WebContents.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/electron/dist/resources/electron.asar/browser/api/web-contents.js:231:13)
    at emitTwo (events.js:106:13)
    at WebContents.emit (events.js:191:7)

[feross]

I doubt that Electron's remote package will work correctly in this case. A better way (and what we do in WebTorrent Desktop) is to use torrent.createServer().

If you call torrent.createServer() in your main process, then you can just add a <video> tag in the renderer that points to the local http server which will serve the video.

<!-- Plays the first file in the torrent -->
<video src="http://localhost:<port>/0" />

[lock]

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