Press play the moment a torrent starts. Torrent Live streams video and audio straight out of the swarm — skip ahead and it fetches the pieces that part of the file needs, so nothing waits for the download to finish. That's WebTorrent underneath, the streaming BitTorrent engine, running as a proper desktop app with the full peer swarm rather than a browser tab. The interface borrows from studio software: a session grid where every torrent is a clip with its own colour and its own level meter.
Streaming while downloading
127.0.0.1 · HTTP byte ranges
The interface, redrawn here in the browser. Meters advance on the app's own 500 ms snapshot tick.
Rosetta gets pulled into an Electron app one of two ways: the Electron binary
itself is x64, or a dependency loads a compiled .node addon built
for x86_64. This build closes both doors.
Electron is arm64. Electron 43 ships native Apple Silicon builds,
and the packager targets arch: [arm64] explicitly. The running app
reports its own architecture in the top-right badge — green for
arm64 native, red the moment it is ever translated.
Nothing is ever compiled. WebTorrent pulls in five optional native
accelerators. Every one has a pure-JavaScript fallback, and every one ships a
prebuilt darwin-arm64 binary. Packaging sets
npmRebuild: false, so node-gyp is never invoked: no compiler, no
Xcode toolchain, no chance of an x86_64 object being linked into an arm64 app.
A session grid is a dense field of coloured clips with level meters, a browser down the left, and a detail panel across the bottom. That maps onto a torrent client almost one-for-one — which is the whole idea.
The styling rules come across intact: completely flat, with no gradients, no shadows and no rounded corners; panels divided by near-black 1px gaps rather than whitespace; monochrome charcoal chrome with saturated colour reserved for data; and selection drawn as a solid yellow fill with black text — the loudest signal in the interface, used sparingly.
| Region | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Control bar | Magnet input, global ↓/↑, peers, ratio |
| Browser sidebar | Status filters — All, Downloading, Seeding, Paused |
| Session grid | One row per torrent, each with its own clip colour |
| Level meters | Progress bars, green turning blue on seed |
| Detail view | File list of the selected torrent, plus the player |
WebTorrent runs in Electron's main process, not the renderer. That's deliberate: the main process can open raw TCP sockets and speak DHT, so the app reaches the ordinary BitTorrent swarm. A renderer-hosted client would only ever see WebRTC peers.
The sandboxed renderer can't read a torrent's chunk store, so the main process serves each file over 127.0.0.1 with HTTP byte-range support. Selecting a range tells WebTorrent to prioritise those pieces — video plays before the download finishes, and seeking pulls the pieces it needs.
Context isolation on, node integration off, sandbox on, and a restrictive CSP where
media-src allows only 127.0.0.1. The stream server binds to loopback
alone and validates every infohash against a 40-hex pattern before touching a file.
External links open in your browser, never in-app.
Torrent Live 0.1.0
This build is signed with a development certificate and hasn't been through Apple's notary service, so Gatekeeper will refuse it the first time. Drag the app to Applications, then right-click it and choose Open — that gives you an Open button the plain double-click doesn't offer. You only do this once.
If macOS still blocks it, clear the quarantine flag:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Torrent Live.app"
There's no x64 build. The point of the project is an app that never touches Rosetta,
so it ships arm64 only. On an Intel Mac, build from source with
npm run dist:universal.
Torrent Live 0.1.0
The installer isn't code-signed, so SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway. It installs per-user by default, so it never asks for an administrator password, and you can change the install location on the way through.
The optional native accelerators are built for macOS, so the Windows build falls back to the pure-JavaScript paths they were always designed to fall back to. In practice that means TCP rather than µTP transport. Everything else behaves the same.
Every one of those is up for grabs. The source is on GitHub, and the README walks through the architecture — why the torrent client lives in the main process, how the loopback stream server works — before you touch anything. Issues and pull requests are welcome.
View the sourceTorrent Live is, honestly, a front end. Everything that makes it a torrent client — the DHT, the peer wire protocol, piece selection, the streaming that lets a video play before it has finished arriving — is WebTorrent, written by Feross Aboukhadijeh and WebTorrent, LLC. This project contributes an interface and a macOS shell around it.
If you find this useful, the upstream project is the thing worth starring, funding and contributing to: webtorrent.io · github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent.
This project's own source is at github.com/juananime/torrentlive, MIT licensed like everything it stands on. Contributions welcome.
Every component below is MIT licensed, and each one's full licence text ships inside the application bundle as required.
| Component | Version | Copyright |
|---|---|---|
| WebTorrent | 3.0.21 | © Feross Aboukhadijeh and WebTorrent, LLC |
| Electron | 43.4.0 | © Electron contributors; © 2013–2020 GitHub Inc. |
| React | 19.2.8 | © Meta Platforms, Inc. and affiliates |