WebTorrent Desktop is a free, open source streaming torrent application for Mac, Windows, and Linux. With WebTorrent Desktop, you can watch video from the Internet Archive, listen to music from Creative Commons, or audiobooks from Librivox.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation WebTorrent Desktop on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
WebTorrent Desktop Features
Lightweight, fast torrent app
Beautiful user experience
Free, non-commercial, ad-free, and open source
Instantly stream video and audio
WebTorrent fetches file pieces from the network on demand for instant playback.
Even when the file isn’t fully downloaded, seeking still works.
(Seeking just reprioritizes which pieces are fetched from the network.)
Stream videos to AirPlay, Chromecast, and DLNA
Based on the most popular and comprehensive torrent package in Node.js, web torrent
Full-featured, but bloat free
Opens magnet links and .torrent files
Drag-and-drop makes adding or creating torrents easy
Discovers peers via tracker servers, DHT (Distributed Hash Table), and peer exchange
Supports the WebTorrent protocol for connecting to WebRTC peers (i.e. web browsers)
Install WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing WebTorrent Desktop.
First, Download the deb package from Github project page and run the following commands to install WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu systems:
sudo apt-get install gdebi wget https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-desktop/releases/download/v0.18.0/webtorrent-desktop_0.18.0-1_amd64.deb sudo gdebi webtorrent-desktop_0.18.0-1_amd64.deb
Once installed, WebTorrent Desktop can be started from Unity Dash or your preferred app launcher or from the terminal:
webtorrent-desktop
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed WebTorrent Desktop. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WebTorrent Desktop web site.