Bittorrent is as far as I know, currently the most efficient way to distribute content on the Internet. It is used all by all sorts of content providers, from national TV stations like NRK, Linux distributors like Debian and Ubuntu, and of course the Internet archive.
Almost a month ago a new package adding Bittorrent support to VLC became available in Debian testing and unstable. To test it, simply install it like this:
apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
Since the plugin was made available for the first time in Debian, several improvements have been made to it. In version 2.2-4, now available in both testing and unstable, a desktop file is provided to teach browsers to start VLC when the user click on torrent files or magnet links. The last part is thanks to me finally understanding what the strange x-scheme-handler style MIME types in desktop files are used for. By adding x-scheme-handler/magnet to the MimeType entry in the desktop file, at least the browsers Firefox and Chromium will suggest to start VLC when selecting a magnet URI on a web page. The end result is that now, with the plugin installed in Buster and Sid, one can visit any Internet Archive page with movies using a web browser and click on the torrent link to start streaming the movie.
Note, there is still some misfeatures in the plugin. One is the fact that it will hang and block VLC from exiting until the torrent streaming starts. Another is the fact that it will pick and play a random file in a multi file torrent. This is not always the video file you want. Combined with the first it can be a bit hard to get the video streaming going. But when it work, it seem to do a good job.
For the Debian packaging, I would love to find a good way to test if the plugin work with VLC using autopkgtest. I tried, but do not know enough of the inner workings of VLC to get it working. For now the autopkgtest script is only checking if the .so file was successfully loaded by VLC. If you have any suggestions, please submit a patch to the Debian bug tracking system.
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