Support http .torrent urls in browser

[phambanhan]

I got error "Uncaught Error: invalid torrent id" with webtorrent in the browser (use webtorrent.min.js). This is my simple code:

var client = new WebTorrent();
var magnet_uri = '';
client.download(magnet_uri, function (torrent) {
console.log('Torrent info hash:', torrent.infoHash)
});

Please help me fix the error

Thanks

[feross]

http .torrent urls are not supported in the browser yet. I changed the title of this issue to reflect the real problem.

Also, worth nothing that:

Until BitTorrent clients support WebTorrent, "pure" WebTorrent clients can only download from other WebTorrent clients.

[feross]

On second thought, I don't want to support http .torrent urls in the browser.

Most .torrent files are going to be hosted on servers that don't set the correct cross-origin resource header (Access-Control-Allow-Origin). So, the XHR request to load the .torrent file will always fail. This is true of the .torrent file you were trying to load.

If the site actually does support CORS, then you can simply fetch it yourself and pass the blob/buffer into client.download and it'll use the .torrent file.

[Wingman4l7]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, CORS shouldn't be an issue if you're trying to make an XHR request to load a .torrent from the current domain, which you might be doing if you were using webtorrent as part of a browser extension.

[feross]

@Wingman4l7 You're right. Is this an important feature to you?

[Wingman4l7]

@feross Definitely! It's a crucial feature in using webtorrent as part of a browser extension. Of course, so is webtorrent using TCP / UDP within the browser, which is currently only does in nodejs... but that's another problem. :P

[feross]

Okay, PR welcome!