+
A few days ago, a new major version of
+VLC was announced, and I
+decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
+bittorrent and
+webtorrent. Bittorrent is one of
+the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
+Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
+WebRTC as its transport channel,
+allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
+The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
+supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
+I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
+Looking at
+the release
+notes did not help answering this question, so I started searching
+the web. I found several news articles from 2013, most of them
+tracing the news from Torrentfreak
+("Open
+Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support"), about a
+initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
+support. To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
+over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
+feature request tickets tracking such feature. I got an answer from
+lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
+but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was. So I searched a bit
+more, and came across an independent
+VLC plugin to add
+bittorrent support, created by Johan Gunnarsson in 2016/2017.
+Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
+about.
+
+
Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
+the git repository, with some modifications. After installing this
+package, I could stream videos from
+The Internet Archive using VLC
+commands like this:
+
+
+vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
+
+
+
The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
+Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
+time tracking down another source, I have not tested it. It can take
+quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
+what is going on from VLC. It took 10-20 seconds when I measured it.
+Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
+play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line. I
+have no idea why.
+
+
I have created a request for
+a new package in Debian (RFP) and
+asked if
+the upstream author is willing to help make this happen. Now we
+wait to see what come out of this. I do not want to maintain a
+package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
+maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this. But I
+really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
+still maintaining the source. If you want to help, please update the
+RFP request or the upstream issue.
+
+
I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.
+
+
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
+
+