WebTorrent

[hex]

There is already a proposal in issue #779 to support a p2p content distribution technology. Sadly SwarmPlayer doesn't seem well at the moment - even the hosting organisation p2p-next seems down.

Luckily there is a new candidate out now to help people distribute content to a large audience. A streaming BitTorrent Client written in JavaScript and running in the browser.
​https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

Providing this would also mean, that we get a torrent for every video for free. So users may also download the content with their BitTorrent Client and seed (distribute) it.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Yes, I absolutely want us to have this! This could be really great, for many reasons, but most especially because it could reduce hosting costs for site administrators.

The biggest challenge will be: how hard is the linked webtorrent package to package? Javascript packages have really slowed down our ability to get accepted into mainstream distributions. One way to get around that problem would be to first develop this as a third party package for MediaGoblin. It would be better to discover it's not an issue (but I'm not sure that'll be true).

I'd really like to get this feature in though!

[Ben Sturmfels]

Marking as medium-sized, as integrating the JavaScript will take a bit of work. I would assume also that the MediaGoblin server would also need to run a BitTorrent server to generate the initial torrent information - that would be significant work to integrate/document.