Webtorrent: Local Service Discovery (BEP14)

[HughIsaacs2]

I feel WebTorrent (node.js) and WebTorrent Desktop needs this to push for further decentralization.
Plus it'd be useful for simply making lives easier by allowing local PCs to share over the BitTorrent protocol.

http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0014.html

Personally, I'd like to take a jab at this but I'm far too deep in the noob realm to grasp everything here.
At first I thought torrent clients were using mDNS to accomplish this and I thought I could just slap on some Node mDNS library to get by but it appears to be something else (at least from my perspective).

Any thoughts?

[HughIsaacs2]

Also, I could've sworn an issue for this BEP was posted before.

[epvbergen]

There are two extensions that do this apparently: BEP-14 straight on top of UDP multicast, and BEP-26 on top of mDNS.

Is there any way to get either transport mechanism working in the browser? It seems a mDNS responder that can do registrations does exist, as it's used for hiding local IP addresses from ICE candidates. I've also seen a Mozilla component that looks complete. The question is, how can one access that from javascript?

Or would one need to bundle a mDNS extension?

[feross]

This was implemented by @hicom150 in https://github.com/webtorrent/bittorrent-lsd and it will be included in the next release of WebTorrent, 0.111.0. Also see: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/issues/1961