Petter Reinholdtsen

VLC in Debian now can do bittorrent streaming
24th September 2018

Back in February, I got curious to see if VLC now supported Bittorrent streaming. It did not, despite the fact that the idea and code to handle such streaming had been floating around for years. I did however find a standalone plugin for VLC to do it, and half a year later I decided to wrap up the plugin and get it into Debian. I uploaded it to NEW a few days ago, and am very happy to report that it entered Debian a few hours ago, and should be available in Debian/Unstable tomorrow, and Debian/Testing in a few days.

With the vlc-plugin-bittorrent package installed you should be able to stream videos using a simple call to

vlc https://archive.org/download/TheGoat/TheGoat_archive.torrent

It can handle magnet links too. Now if only native vlc had bittorrent support. Then a lot more would be helping each other to share public domain and creative commons movies. The plugin need some stability work with seeking and picking the right file in a torrent with many files, but is already usable. Please note that the plugin is not removing downloaded files when vlc is stopped, so it can fill up your disk if you are not careful. Have fun. :)

I would love to get help maintaining this package. Get in touch if you are interested.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: english, verkidetfri, video.

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