
Show HN: Transfer files between computers using WebRTC - erbbysam
http://rtccopy.com
======
aviswanathan
One of the coolest implementations of WebRTC is a project my friend launched
called PeerCDN (<https://peercdn.com/>) - basically allows you to reduce
bandwidth costs by leveraging the resources of active users on your app.

~~~
christiangenco
Holy cow - this is amazing!

My girlfriend brought up a good point: is there any way to opt-out of seeding?

~~~
aviswanathan
Hmm not sure... Haven't actually tried it out yet

------
jodrellblank
Welcome to 1991, Web browsers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-Client>

~~~
est
The feature of WebRTC is that you don't have to install any plugins or
extensions, but wait, you have to install a 22MB browser instead of few KB IRC
client.

------
ianlevesque
This is neat. I've been meaning to do something like it myself for fun. I'd be
far more interested in one that just let's you drop a file and gives you a URL
for your friend to visit with no other steps. Having one of these services
that does the transfer directly peer to peer without accounts or setup steps
would be great.

~~~
erbbysam
I think <http://sharefest.peer5.com/> is actually exactly that.

~~~
ianlevesque
Yes! That's a great execution of this.

------
plaes
How about testing the WebRTC availability straight on the frontpage?

~~~
niggler
or even a public room with a public name like 'public'

~~~
ancarda
I made a room which anyone can join. Would be cool to see how it scales.

<http://rtccopy.com/#KJMHud6Q>

Edit: Incase anyone is interested, I have a chat log up:
<http://ancarda.net/rtccopy.log.txt>

~~~
niggler
Tested it. File send and receive does work.

------
pbhjpbhj
Opera Unite was trying to do peer-to-peer centrally indexed file sharing as
part of their offering I think (<http://unite.opera.com/application/132/>).

I blogged about it back in 2009 anyhow (under the self-effacing title of
"Opera is about to change the world?!"!).

------
leeoniya
any specific reason why it's chrome-only?

<http://www.webrtc.org/firefox>

~~~
erbbysam
As ianlevesque mentioned in the link below, <http://peerjs.com/status> is a
good overview of current state of data channels. As Firefox stabilizes their
WebRTC data channel support, I will implement it. Hopefully there will soon be
cross-browser support as well for data channels.

~~~
willscott
Firefox is currently ahead on the data channel, right? They support sending
blobs / arrayBuffers directly, while Chrome doesn't yet have a reliable
transport or binary data support.

Your example translates the file into a base64 string to send over the
unreliable channel, which ends up being a pretty big performance hit compared
to a native binary transport.

All of this is to say: WebRTC is getting there, but it's still going to be
several months before it's ready for more than demos like this.

~~~
ericz
It's true that it supports binary / reliable transport already but there are
some very annoying not-to-spec issues. As a library developer, if I added code
to support it, it would just go to waste because in BugZilla they've already
patched but not pushed changes to these issues.

------
duaneb
Is this an encrypted/secure connection? I don't see how without certs.

~~~
ericz
WebRTC encrypts by default and you have to manually edit the SDP to turn it
off. I highly doubt the developer went to the lengths to do that.

------
thomasbk
My Chrome tab crashed when I tried sending a 440mb file!

~~~
nacs
From their website:

"Your browser will likely crash if you attempt to send a single file larger
than 100MB, your mileage will vary."

------
shacharz
<http://sharefest.me> is another file sharing platform, works both on chrome
and firefox (but not inter-operable yet).

------
ianlevesque
I suspect the same reasons outlined here: <http://peerjs.com/status>

------
scotty79
Could you make it work on Chromium on Linux?

~~~
erbbysam
When I was initially developing this a month ago, I used the Chromium nightly
build on Ubuntu on my laptop. Since then my laptop's video card died. I'm
going to probably roll out a linux VM soon to make sure this works with
Chromium nightly still.

