Webtorrent-desktop: If I scroll into middle of file, it is downloaded sequentially until the end, but then continue downloads from beginning (which is not needed and a waste of traffic)

[ethaniel]

What version of WebTorrent Desktop? (See the 'About WebTorrent' menu)
0.7.2

What operating system and version?
Mac OS

What did you do?
Started playing my video from the middle.

What did you expect to happen?
Buffer until the end of the file and then stop completely.

What actually happened?
WTD downloaded until the end of the file. And continued downloading from the beginning, which I had no intention of viewing. Thus, wasting my bandwidth.

This is the best viewer I have seen so far. Set up a donation box, so I could throw in some beer money.

[Goldob]

See #630

WebTorrent automatically downloads all torrents, except for deselected files. Opening a file in player only proritizes that file, specifically the fragments which are needed on the fly. That's why after the file has loaded until the end, this file, and potentially other files, continues to download.

I agree this might be a waste of bandwidth or storage space. Sometimes I just want to stream a torrent and not save anything. Maybe there could be added an option for that in preferences/per-torrent options?

[feross]

This is interesting.

I don't want to add another preference. But I do think we could make a conceptual change to how the app works to make streaming the default behavior, to make things more intuitive. The enable/disable button we have now is not very intuitive.

Here's the idea:

• Torrents added to WebTorrent Desktop would be inactive by default. When the user wants to consume a torrent they hit the play button, it becomes active, and starts streaming. The download location is /tmp.
• With /tmp as the lcoation, the files will stick around until the OS needs to clean them up or disk space is low.
• The torrent remains active for a couple hours after streaming (or until a certain ratio is seeded) to give back to the network. Then it is automatically switched to inactive.
• Users can always remove torrents from WebTorrent Desktop to stop sharing and cleanup files, just like they can now.
• For users who want files to be available offline or want to access them directly in Finder / Windows Explorer, they enable an "Available Offline" switch.
  
• When enabled, the "Available Offline" switch changes the download location to ~/Downloads (or whatever the user's download folder is) so the files become visible to the user and accessible via Finder / Windows Explorer.

With these changes, the user will care less which torrents are active vs. inactive (which honestly, is already a bit unclear in our interface). Active vs. inactive will be managed automatically most of the time. But, we can also have a right click > "Disable Torrent" and right click > "Enable Torrent" options for those who want to manage everything explicitly.

Thoughts?