Embedding parts of this tech.

[krazyjakee]

Not sure if this is the best place for this question but here goes anyway.

These ideas are amazing but after reading all the media, I still don't fully get what webtorrent is capable of.

Would it be possible to embed this tech for something like p2p video streams? I'm sure there are many other uses that people may want to "slap" into their blog pages like any other plugin.

Peace.

[trevorstarick]

Yep. Sites like http://reep.io use WebRTC to share files P2P and they're adding the ability to stream videos shortly. I've written up a quick application to share nVidia Shadowplay videos in a Twitch/YouYube style all using webtorrents and peerflix.

Webtorrent is still in alpha and many of the features that you would need to create a mesh network/full p2p streaming platform aren't done or even started yet.

[feross]

@krazyjakee Yep, the goal for webtorrent is to support streaming as many video formats at possible, directly into a <video> tag.

For webm and mp4, we can support video streaming (without seeking) very easily. This is straightforward. To support seeking, the MediaSource API requires some extra metadata about the video file which we may be able to generate on the fly, but this sounds tricky to get right. An easier approach might be to ask torrent creators to embed a special metadata file in their torrent (or encode the video file with the metadata built-in) if they want it to be easily streamable in browsers.

[feross]

@trevorstarick Is there a link to your app that is using webtorrent/peerflix?

[krazyjakee]

@feross @trevorstarick Revolutionary and scary. Mostly revolutionary.

[trevorstarick]

@feross Currently cleaning and publishing the repo from private to public. I'll link it momentarily.

[trevorstarick]

I just noticed that I never got Peerflix working properly with my code. Repo is here: https://github.com/trevorstarick/shivver and I might look into it again. Work took priority over it so it never got that far off the ground.

[olealgoritme]

Webtorrent can only download webtorrents and not normal torrents (for video playback in video tag) ?

I tried the example in the Readme file but no luck.

[feross]

@thailemon WebTorrent can only download torrents that are seeded to the webtorrent network. Currently, this is basically no torrents. This situation will improve over time. To test things out for now, you can use http://instant.io/ to seed torrents into the network.