Mathias has done some really interesting things with the BitTorrent protocol and Node.js and friends. I just saw his talk from JSConfEU last year and found it pretty fascinating (http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/mathias-buus-madsen-javascrip...). The applicability for this type of technology does seem a lot greater than what it's traditionally been used for.
Other than playing with fun technologies (which I'm all for) what does this bring us?
It doesn't seem to play many formats (one of the major strengths of VLC is that it plays almost anything) nothing I saw about it that seems to scream innovative UI or super efficient playblack on low-end devices.
We wanted to see how easy it was to build "native" apps with html/css/javascript today using atom-shell. And it turns out that it's actually quite easy.
A feature we missed from VLC was that you could send video to Chromecast. That feature is now in Playback.
Your actual video player app is built on a UI library that just uses the same thing this video player app does.
Sure, you could skip a layer and make your video player talk directly to X11, but it wouldn't be cross-platform.
The browser is both an HTTP client and a UI kit, and some people are starting to skip the HTTP client part, and use it as a UI framework, essentially a competitor to Qt or GTK. That includes editors such as Brackets, Light Table or Atom, video viewers such as the infamous Popcorn Time, and games such as Game Dev Tycoon.
Picking a UI library is always about finding the right balance between cross-platform, ease of development and memory usage. Kits such as node-webkit and the Atom Shell (used here) give access to one more choice, albeit one which may consume more memory (for now) than many other options.
The live streaming of the BT sounds like a very interesting feature. One that could lead to possible improvements to those sites hosting videos behind thousands of ads.
