TorrentGlide door Emil Rakhimianov

Play torrent and magnet videos in your browser while they download. Playback starts on the first pieces.

TorrentGlide catches magnet and .torrent links as you click them and opens the video in a player tab. You can watch as soon as the first pieces arrive, without waiting for the whole torrent. It handles subtitles and season packs, and plays formats a browser can't play by itself, such as MKV. There's no account and no website in between: the torrent runs on your own computer.

HOW IT WORKS

TorrentGlide pairs this extension with the torrent service, a free, open-source BitTorrent client that runs in the background on your computer. The torrent service joins the swarm and serves the file to the player over HTTP on your own machine, fetching the pieces under the playhead first. Watching starts in seconds, and seeking ahead doesn't wait for everything in between. The player reads the file in the browser with FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly and decodes it with the browser's own video decoders. Nothing is transcoded or uploaded anywhere.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Click a magnet or .torrent link on any site and choose "Open in TorrentGlide", or let the browser handle it as usual. Ctrl/⌘ clicks and middle clicks are left alone.
• Right-click any link and choose "Open link in TorrentGlide", for download pages whose link only turns out to be a torrent once it's fetched
• Open torrents from TorrentGlide's page: drop a .torrent file, or paste a magnet link, an info hash or a .torrent URL
• Use trackers that need a login: TorrentGlide fetches the .torrent file with your session on that site
• Download only what you watch: just the file you play is selected, and other downloads pause while you watch
• Play MP4, MKV, WebM, MOV, AVI, TS and more, with a software decoding fallback when the browser's decoder refuses a video
• Watch with subtitles: .srt, .vtt and .ttml files in the torrent are matched to the video, and embedded subtitle and audio tracks are in the player's menus
• Watch a series: the file menu groups a season pack's episodes, switches between them without leaving fullscreen, and opens again when an episode ends
• Pick up where you left off: each file remembers its position, and History lists your torrents with their progress, ready to play again or to remove, with or without their files
• Change the playback speed. ← and → skip 10 seconds, and with Ctrl or ⌘ they step one frame.
• Choose a light, dark or system theme, and one of 12 languages

PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE

There is no TorrentGlide server. Apart from fetching the .torrent files you click, the extension talks only to the torrent service at the address in its settings, by default http://localhost:3030 on your own computer. The video streams from there to the player tab without leaving your machine, or your network if the service runs on another computer. No account, no analytics, no telemetry. The only other traffic is what BitTorrent itself needs, the torrent service talking to trackers, the DHT and peers for the torrents you open, plus GitHub once, when Start's installer downloads the torrent service. While a torrent plays, the torrent service shares the pieces it has with other peers, as BitTorrent clients do. Everything else is paused, and closing the player pauses its torrent too, so nothing TorrentGlide opened keeps downloading or seeding behind your back. On web pages, the extension acts only on your own clicks on torrent links. A page's scripts can't trigger it.

To use it in private windows, allow it there: Manage Extension → Run in Private Windows.

WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG

The dot next to TorrentGlide's name shows the torrent service's state: green when it answers, red when it doesn't. Hover over it to see which version is running at which address, or what went wrong. If you've taken away TorrentGlide's access to websites, it says so and offers Allow. When the service isn't running, Start walks you through setting it up. While the player waits, it says what for: a magnet's metadata, or the first pieces. The player's settings panel has a Connection section with download progress, speed and peers. If the browser's decoder refuses a video, the player offers software decoding instead. Leave review with one to three stars opens an email to the developer, so a problem reaches the person who can fix it.

WHAT TORRENTGLIDE IS NOT

TorrentGlide is a torrent player, not a catalogue. It has no search, no index and no content of its own: it opens only the torrents you click or add. Use it for content you have the right to access, such as open movies like Big Buck Bunny and Sintel, public-domain archives, Linux distributions and your own files.

REQUIREMENTS

• Firefox for desktop, on macOS, Windows or Linux
• The torrent service, free and open source. If it isn't running, Start saves an installer for your system: a macOS package, a Windows program, a .deb, .rpm or Arch package, or a script. It downloads the torrent service's official release from GitHub, checks its SHA-256 against the digest GitHub publishes (when GitHub's API answers), and starts the service at every login. The installers aren't signed yet, so macOS and Windows ask you to confirm before running them. Start also links to the service's manual installation guide, if you'd rather set it up yourself, on this computer or another one, and enter its address in TorrentGlide's settings.

Available in English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, Português (Brasil), Polski, Türkçe, Русский, Українська, 日本語 and 简体中文. The player's own controls are in English.

Screenshots show Big Buck Bunny, (c) copyright 2008 Blender Foundation, www.bigbuckbunny.org, licensed under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).