We officially have a new method of streaming video content, which would be in the form of WebTorrent! This technology is absolutely amazing for more reasons than one and we are intending on backporting most (if not all) videos already hosted here into the WebTorrent distribution method. What is it, why is it great and why should you care? Everything is gonna be broken down right here.
What is WebTorrent? An Overview #
First things first, you should know what this technology is. If you were to guess that it had some similarity to the things you use to illegally download stuff, you would actually be right! WebTorrent is a “Peer 2 Peer” technology based on “BitTorrent”, which is the protocol you interface with any time you download something via a software like qBitTorrent. WebTorrent and BitTorrent, while essentially the same, are very different in one major aspect: One works over and communicates with the browser, while the other is reliant on UDP/TCP connections which the browsers apparently cannot understand by themselves.
Now, the cool thing about WebTorrent, is that you can very easily share files with other peers, with some websites even providing you a private solution for file transfer! Entropic Domain won’t have that private solution, but will rather liberally share the media it hosts so that anyone who wants to watch, read or listen to high quality content can do so… and could even download said content for themselves in order to help seed it and get the highest quality compressed videos which decimate YouTube’s own video quality.
If you aren’t convinced, you can just try out WebTorrent for yourself. Check this out!
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Copy to Download! If the video does not play in your browser, either try a different one or watch it through a WebTorrent client.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ad250ea241368cf2b68cd6c0d50954d8124f7c87&dn=SamplerSubstancesFullQual60.webm&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.empire-js.us%3A1337&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.btorrent.xyz&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openwebtorrent.com
What you are seeing is a torrent being streamed to you, just like that! This happens without any fear for our bandwidth limits being overexerted, due to the files being hosted on multiple devices that aren’t the very VPS entropicdomain.net is hosted on. One source is the Mirage Arcane Warfare Game Server, another a Raspberry Pi 3, and another being Cheecken’s computer.
A revolutionary Solution you can benefit from too! #
The magic of WebTorrent, is that it decentralizes file hosting and gives viewers/readers the opportunity to download the media on their own devices. The more of you torrent the files on this website and seed them, the more robust this decentralized content delivery method is going to be. It is a win / win / win really.
- The website can reliably stream video without fearing crippling bandwidth related overcharges
- Viewers can watch Cheecken YouTube Channel content in the highest quality out there
- And finally there is less of a reliance on YouTube to deliver video, written and audio content
The cool thing is, even just watching a video on the website helps out the network. As long as the window stays open, you are effectively a seed that aids the seeding process. A much more reliable method of seeding this content, would be if you downloaded these videos and seeded them from your computer. For this you can use multiple programs, which come with their own benefits.
WebTorrent Desktop and WebTorrent over the CLI #
If you want to download videos directly to your computer and host them, or stream any kind of WebTorrent directly to your computer, WebTorrent Desktop is the perfect application to use. It is a very simple client which allows the user to watch a video as it is downloading and allows a user to reliably seed downloaded files. WebTorrent Desktop actually is a hybrid client, meaning that it can also download files from the regular BitTorrent swarm!
This is how WebTorrent Desktop looks like. It is simple and allows you to even create WebTorrents yourself! If you want to help seed content on this website, just download it by pasting in a magnet link and keep the program open in the background. The more people participate, the less the bandwidth impact is going to be for every user.
WebTorrent-CLI (or just the “webtorrent” package on GitHub) is a more specialised program. That one allows you to install webtorrent on a remote computer, such as a server or Raspberry Pi or other remote device you have available to you. If any of you have your own server and are willing to donate bandwidth, it would be an absolutely MASSIVE contribution to the network. We strive to deliver files in as small of a formfactor as possible without compromising much on quality, so you will have much space left on your seedbox or private server for the things you are using the server for anyhow.
More WebTorrent capable clients to check out #
- βTorrent - A WebTorrent client in the browser
- Vuze - A Hybrid client that supports both regular BitTorrent and WebTorrent
- WizTorrent - A Hybrid client which is packed with a multitude of features
And there likely are many more!
How about regular clients? #
You can definitely download any file you want to a client such as qBitTorrent or seedboxes (which are essentially servers explicitly for torrenting and file sharing) and while hosting files over there will improve download speeds in WebTorrent Desktop as an example, the problem at present is that those regular BitTorrent seeds are not contributing to the web streams at all. This is due to Browsers not being able to speak with those clients directly as they can only communicate over WebRTC.
If you do use a popular torrent client though, especially on a seedbox that you seemingly cannot fill up, then you might want to consider downloading and seeding files over them anyhow. qBitTorrent and many other clients are based on the libtorrent protocol, which already has WebRTC support built in, with popular torrent clients not having implemented WebRTC support just yet. Maybe one day your client of choice might actually get to support WebRTC and in turn WebTorrent, which would open up even more download sources for this website!
Known Issues #
If you have a slow internet connection it might be a bit annoying to not be able to stop the download and seeding process. This is sadly not a bug but a feature as WebTorrent is explicitly designed to download the files to disk and immediately seed them. If you use this site on a mobile plan with a limited budget, you don’t have to worry too much as the video only downloads when it is played. If you decide to watch bits and pieces of it, your browser tab will seed the files you have downloaded to other peers too. Overall it is recommended to watch WebTorrents over a Desktop, Laptop, Tablet or Phone that is connected to a stable unlimited internet connection. Rest assured that Cheecken does his best to keep files as small as possible without compromising on quality, what you will get are incredibly small renditions of Cheecken channel videos which have been optimized for the WebTorrent Swarm.
There might also be incompatibilities on Safari and other non standard browsers. This could be due to multiple factors, like your browser not supporting the WebTorrent content delivery method, or your browser not liking the VP9 and Opus codecs or them being in a WebM container. Not much you can do, other than downloading another browser or downloading the torrents over some kind of torrent client.
As you can see in this example, the Chivalry Dead Game Review has been slashed down to a size of only 3.3GB from a 19GB source file!
If you just can’t watch anything in the browser and do not want to make the switch to another browser out of lazyness, then you can feel free to stream and download any video using WebTorrent Desktop or similar applications and websites. Instant.io is also great for downloading the files directly to your computer. (WebTorrent Desktop is recommended however for Seeding)
Last but not least, WebTorrent is not anonymous. If you have any qualms about that, please watch and seed using a VPN service of your choice.