We’ve completely rebuilt the video player, added continue watching, and shipped a few more things you might enjoy.
New Video Player
We replaced mediaelement.js with a custom player built on Preact and HLS.js. It’s lighter, faster, and gives us full control over the playback experience.
What changed:
- Better mobile UX — controls are more responsive on touch devices
- Fixed seek on iOS — jumping to a position now works reliably on iPhones and iPads
- Improved embed mode — the player works better when embedded on third-party sites
This is the foundation for everything we’re building next with the player.
Continue Watching
You can now pick up where you left off. Webtor tracks your playback position and shows a “Resume from X:XX?” prompt when you come back to a video.
For series, it goes further — when you finish an episode, the next one starts automatically. No more hunting for the right episode in a folder.
Speed Test
We added a speed test page that measures your connection to Webtor servers right in the browser. But here’s the twist — it runs a dual test, comparing throughput on a standard server vs. a premium one, so you can see the difference for yourself.
Results are saved and get a shareable link, so you can easily reference them later.
TMDB Enrichment
Torrent pages now pull metadata from TMDB automatically — posters, descriptions, and episode info for series. If you open a torrent through Discover, the resource page shows full details instead of just file names.
We also added a share button for regular torrents, making it easier to send a link to someone.
Under the Hood
A few things that make streaming smoother:
- Prefetch buffering — the proxy now buffers content from bursty torrent sources before sending it to you, resulting in steadier playback
- Automatic retry — if a backend pod goes down mid-stream, the proxy transparently retries on another one
- No more size limits — the seeder now evicts least-recently-used data on the fly, so you can stream torrents of any size without running out of disk space
- Faster subtitle loading — reduced timeout from 30s to 5s with proper fallbacks
Thanks for using Webtor. More updates coming soon.