webtorrent-hybrid

th it over IPC from Node.js, which means it runs everywhere that Electron does (without waiting for anything to compile!), but it's a pretty heavy-handed approach. Launching a whole Chromium instance when you need a socket is, like, not ideal. Another idea: how about implementing just the parts needed for Data Channel in JavaScript? A former Mozilla engineer, now Google engineer, actually tried this but gave up before finishing. His code is here: https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/node-rtc-peer-connection It's also not trivial since it requires a DTLS (TLS over UDP) implementation, and it's not exactly trivial to write one of those in JS. There is a chance that Node.js could expose the DTLS implementation from OpenSSL, since that's already part of Node. Then we could probably achieve a "pure JS" (no npm compile step) implementation of Data Channel. But there's still quite a bit more code needed to finish off this implementation. Discussion here: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/2398 I'm grateful to all the awesome folks that worked on these implementations, and this isn't meant to snub any of them. WebRTC is hard! We actually use `electron-webrtc` in `webtorrent-hybrid`, a CLI version of WebTorrent that can talk to "web peers" in browsers (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid). Fortunately, most users can just install WebTorrent Desktop (https://webtorrent.io/desktop/) which works nicely. But this all goes to show just how overly complex WebRTC is, and why we really do need something like this post suggests, a low-level UDP API for the web.

e 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: https://github.com/webrtcftw/goals/issues/1 https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues/13