Webtorrent seems to have some issues with peer discovery. I’ve tried the instant.io site they have linked on webtorrent.io and I can’t get it to download or share anything, the desktop client managed to download a torrent from my peertube instance over normal BitTorrent but I can’t share it over webtorrent. I downloaded a video from my peertube instance using btorrent.xyz over webtorrent but I can’t seed new files because the peers don’t find each other. when I use a webtorrent with a tracker (like peertube) it works fine but how were sites like instant.io supposed to discover peers without trackers? I don’t think DHT exists for webtorrent yet.
You can manually seed videos on instances using redundancy but I was thinking automatic redundancy for watched videos might be a good idea, I guess you can do automatic redundancy for entire instances but that would take up a lot of storage space.
One of the nice thing with BitTorrent is the high reliability so I assumed that was what peertube was trying to do, I guess the idea is not to provide data redundancy but to split load instead?
I have done some testing and I found a few reasons I’m having issues with webtorrent:
The only reason they where working at all is because they were downloading from the HTTP URL in the torrent file, P2P was not working at all.
To download the webtorrent from the blender instance I need to have the video watched in my browser to peer with the webtorrent client, the instance peers don’t work on non-peertube webtorrent clients.
The reason instant.io was broken is my adblocker was blocking the tracker.
The tracker in my peertube instance is broken.EDIT:
I was a bit wrong here, there are two different formats in peertube: webtorrent and HLS. I was getting confused why the video on my instance (HLS) and the one on the blender one (webtorrent) was behaving differently with webtorrent clients. They are completely different formats so that makes sense now.