Peertube is something I've been meaning to use, so I'm interested but don't know much about it.
The post says they dropped webtorrent in favor of HLS. Does this mean Peertube is no longer peer-to-peer?
HLS is a codec or container format or something, whereas webtorrent sounds like a method to have peers stream video data to each other such that the server doesn't easily bog down under traffic spikes. That seemed like a fundamental advantage of Peertube over other platforms and I thought that's why the name was chosen. Am I misreading it or has this truly been dropped now?
The post says HLS is also a brick in peer-to-peer streaming but.. it's not? I've used it, it's a container format that encapsulates video data, something like MP4 or MKV, not something that sets up peering sessions. HLS data would rather be something that webtorrent could be gossiping, if webtorrent weren't removed.
There is a page on official documentation (docs.joinpeertube.org) (which needs to be updated to reflect the removal of WebTorrent but is still relevant on hls parts).
Here is the one concerning us:
"
- If using the HLS player (depending on the admin transcoding configuration):
- The player loads the HLS playlist using hls.js from the origin server
- PeerTube provides a custom loader to hls.js that downloads segments from HTTP but also from P2P via WebRTC
- Segments are loaded by HTTP from the origin server + servers that mirrored the video and by WebRTC from other web browsers that are watching the video. They are used by hls.js to stream them into the <video> HTML element"
PeerTube is distributed streaming, not distributed hosting. The master copy is hosted on some web site, yours or someone else's. If enough people are watching, a peer to peer streaming distribution system kicks in to provide more bandwidth. It's just a way to have many viewers without needing huge hosting bandwidth.
Almost nobody uses PeerTube. Here's the "Trending" list on Hardlimit.[1] 217 views of the top video. A video I posted two days ago to illustrate a bug report is in 9th position, with 14 views. This is pathetic.
Maybe if they got Wordpress integration, so Wordpress sites could serve videos via Peertube, it might take off. And get more sites to support auto-embedding of PeerTube videos, so that just providing a link produces a playable video.
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
This is very confusing to me too. WebTorrents are just torrents over WebRTC Data stream, I guess by "P2P HLS" they mean sending HLS over either WebRTC Data or Video stream?
Removal of WebTorrent is sad, as it's still WIP in actual torrent clients (but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault). So it was removed before it got a chance in an ecosystem that moves slow.
It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs. https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be reuploads, old versions should be separate.
As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and duplicated.
Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement Live Streaming with it (available since v3).
> but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault
Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about data streams.
Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this is what webtorrent-desktop uses).
I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.
I created a peertube client[1] for android a few years ago. I love peertube and I really believe in the project however the effort I have put into the client and the rewrite which I almost finished using jetpack/mvvm structure just doesn't seem to be worth it. I feel bad for abandoning it but I think I may have too.
I love the idea of this project. But unfortunately there are economic reasons that make PeerTube unlikely to win. It's not even about the cost of video hosting, it would apply even if hosting was free.
Imagine yourself as a popular creator. You can put up your videos on an ad-free platform where users can watch them without distractions and be happy. Or you can put them on an ad-supported platform and get a cut of the sweet ad money. As your videos become more popular, the temptation to go for (2) will become stronger. So the free platform will experience a drain of the most popular content, and viewers will flock away accordingly too.
The same argument applies more generally to free vs commercial platforms. It's basically the reason why the internet sucks so much today. If there's a way to square this circle, I don't know it.
How do people rate the ease of installing and administrating PeerTube?
Is there a way to install PeerTube that is as easy as MediaCMS [0, 1] installation [2]?
I ask because I evaluated options for self-hosted video (basically YouTube replacements). PeerTube is more mature/popular than MediaCMS by far, by the looks of it. However, I really wanted "easy" and ended up landing with MediaCMS for now. I somewhat wonder about the project's potential longevity, but set that concern aside for lack of "better" options.
If PeerTube can be spun up (single server will do) just as easily, I'd love to learn if it's possible/done. I know this is a tech site, but I do not want to spend time administering and configuring stuff a lot that is outside the scope of my main activities. I want it to just work as much as possible, but self-hosted (bare metal okay).
I get that PeerTube is maybe much more, but any thoughts on taming (perceived or actual?) complexity related to hosting PeerTube would be most welcome. Thanks for any thoughts along these lines.
I run my own peertube instance like I run my own mastodon instance.
Mastodon is cool, your private instance can just link up to any other instance and get all the data. If you search for something, your instance will proxy the search back to the originating server. The experience is only trivially more annoying than just using one of the big servers.
Peertube is not like that. Notionally it supports all the same features, but when all the details come together, it just doesn't work.
Say you have a private instance and you just want to browse videos. How do you find remote content? You can have your server 'follow' another, duplicating its timeline into yours... If the remote server allows it. As a user, you can simply follow any channel anywhere and it will populate into your server's local timeline.
But what about search? You have to use a third party search index, and it's opt-in. Or you can go to each remote instance you know of and search there directly.
Assuming you have a bunch of content coming into your server somehow, how do you find something to watch? You don't! Most of the filtering and searching is useless. Your individual user subscription feed is the only thing even remotely reliable.
As much as I want to love PeerTube, I really, really hate it. Discoverability is so bad that the whole platform is nearly unusable.
Realistically I'm sure that the best results you can get is just from signing up to the largest instance you can find. Which really defeats the entire point of it being distributed and federated.
It really doesn't matter how many videos exist on the service if no one can find them. PeerTube is going to have to put some serious effort into this problem or they're going to fade into irrelevancy in a few years.
Truly inspiring work from Framasoft! I just hope for more adoption. I don't know if anyone remembers the days of Firefox 2 and 3 and the days of "community marketing" but I think something like that could be a worthwhile project here. I would love, for instance, if significant creators could do a Framasoft February each year where they commit to hosting some portion of videos of their choice on Peertube.
Well, how reliable is peertube? Say I would do a ShowHN, that gets traction and a HN hug of death. In theory peertube could take the load for the videos without having to rely on youtube - but has anyone done this succesful in reality?
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
Sad to see WebTorrent support go. I'm a big believer in the idea of Torrent over WebRTC, and PeerTube seemed like a great use of the technology. It really solves the "this video is going viral and I'm being hugged to death" problem. I haven't heard much about P2P HLS... Hope to hear more.
IIRC from about 2005-2010 there were intense experiments as to using torrents for video streaming. But, again iirc, the results were that there was too much competition for the earlier blocks. This was because unlike conventional file sharing, streaming is linear and people abandon videos halfway. Ultimately the savings over conventional hosted streaming were small. And so Blizzard and Nine Inch Nails used it, but the video players didn't.
Do I misremember something, or has something substantially changed since then?
bittorrent is not a CPU hog. But peer-to-peer WebRTC video is a major hog that makes it a pain to share video with more than ~7 people. Is this also true for peertube?
My test server you can reach at https://troll.tv/ . It has very limited federation as I need the content to pass the play store when I release an update to the android client.
I still cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate HN users can't seem to understand the purpose of PeerTube.
Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website.
Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings? Same
Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the video material? Same.
Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
"Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website."
If I'm a small company, I'd use something like BunnyCDN to stream my videos, because no one else will watch them so the benefits of Peertube are not there.
If I'm a company and I'm large I should have no problems paying for something and again would use something like BunnyCDN.
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
> Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
... the first image on the article linked here shows a monster called "Videorapter" with YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch logos, and calls for donations to "help push back Videoraptor"?
How likely is it that my company's promotional videos will be federated to the extent that it'll actually reduce my bandwidth cost by a non-trivial amount? Will hosting videos like this increase reliability or reduce it? I genuinely don't know - i've never used it - but it would be far from my first pick for this kind of stuff.
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
I think when you “cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate users can't seem to understand the purpose of” something, then sometimes you need to that as a signal and reevaluate.
> Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website.
That video is likely to end up blocked by corporate users. If I'm a company I don't want to have my audience of potential customers looking things up on their lunch break reduced.
Relatedly, Mastodon is a) too hard for me to sign up for and b) a failed experiment. That the former was being repeated by people here still makes me chuckle.
I think because many of us are not big fans of fediverse. For all of those examples you provided I would rather just pay for an existing service rather than burn time running PeerTube. The fediverse projects are interesting and glad people enjoy them but they are still not made for the masses (which I suppose is to the liking of those that enjoy the fediverse.
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth
Don't visitors need to watch the same videos at the same time for this benefit to materialize?
If so, it seems unlikely for the examples you mention (promo videos, conference recordings) and so I don't know that that is an effective selling point.
What is the incentive to self host when embedding YouTube videos is free and easy? Peer tube might make it easy but it adds a lot of maintenance complexity and server costs. Is the avoiding risk associated with YouTube over the video control worth that cost? For some maybe, but most I imagine not.
Still has the same problem as all these alternative social media networks and why they're not taking off: on one hand you've got YouTube/etc which works and has appealing content front-and-centre, and on the other you have technobabble like "federation" and "instances" while the actual content (if there is even any!) is relegated into some dark corner.
YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.
The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?
These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com and immediately start watching.
[+] [-] Aachen|2 years ago|reply
The post says they dropped webtorrent in favor of HLS. Does this mean Peertube is no longer peer-to-peer?
HLS is a codec or container format or something, whereas webtorrent sounds like a method to have peers stream video data to each other such that the server doesn't easily bog down under traffic spikes. That seemed like a fundamental advantage of Peertube over other platforms and I thought that's why the name was chosen. Am I misreading it or has this truly been dropped now?
The post says HLS is also a brick in peer-to-peer streaming but.. it's not? I've used it, it's a container format that encapsulates video data, something like MP4 or MKV, not something that sets up peering sessions. HLS data would rather be something that webtorrent could be gossiping, if webtorrent weren't removed.
[+] [-] booteille|2 years ago|reply
There is a page on official documentation (docs.joinpeertube.org) (which needs to be updated to reflect the removal of WebTorrent but is still relevant on hls parts).
Here is the one concerning us:
" - If using the HLS player (depending on the admin transcoding configuration):
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
Almost nobody uses PeerTube. Here's the "Trending" list on Hardlimit.[1] 217 views of the top video. A video I posted two days ago to illustrate a bug report is in 9th position, with 14 views. This is pathetic.
Maybe if they got Wordpress integration, so Wordpress sites could serve videos via Peertube, it might take off. And get more sites to support auto-embedding of PeerTube videos, so that just providing a link produces a playable video.
[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/trending
[+] [-] j_maffe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pzmarzly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avamander|2 years ago|reply
It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs. https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be reuploads, old versions should be separate.
As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and duplicated.
[+] [-] booteille|2 years ago|reply
Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement Live Streaming with it (available since v3).
[+] [-] pzmarzly|2 years ago|reply
Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about data streams.
Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this is what webtorrent-desktop uses).
I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.
[+] [-] jessehattabaugh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|2 years ago|reply
I created a peertube client[1] for android a few years ago. I love peertube and I really believe in the project however the effort I have put into the client and the rewrite which I almost finished using jetpack/mvvm structure just doesn't seem to be worth it. I feel bad for abandoning it but I think I may have too.
[1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
[+] [-] cousin_it|2 years ago|reply
Imagine yourself as a popular creator. You can put up your videos on an ad-free platform where users can watch them without distractions and be happy. Or you can put them on an ad-supported platform and get a cut of the sweet ad money. As your videos become more popular, the temptation to go for (2) will become stronger. So the free platform will experience a drain of the most popular content, and viewers will flock away accordingly too.
The same argument applies more generally to free vs commercial platforms. It's basically the reason why the internet sucks so much today. If there's a way to square this circle, I don't know it.
[+] [-] entrepy123|2 years ago|reply
Is there a way to install PeerTube that is as easy as MediaCMS [0, 1] installation [2]?
I ask because I evaluated options for self-hosted video (basically YouTube replacements). PeerTube is more mature/popular than MediaCMS by far, by the looks of it. However, I really wanted "easy" and ended up landing with MediaCMS for now. I somewhat wonder about the project's potential longevity, but set that concern aside for lack of "better" options.
If PeerTube can be spun up (single server will do) just as easily, I'd love to learn if it's possible/done. I know this is a tech site, but I do not want to spend time administering and configuring stuff a lot that is outside the scope of my main activities. I want it to just work as much as possible, but self-hosted (bare metal okay).
I get that PeerTube is maybe much more, but any thoughts on taming (perceived or actual?) complexity related to hosting PeerTube would be most welcome. Thanks for any thoughts along these lines.
[+] [-] hardcopy|2 years ago|reply
https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|2 years ago|reply
Couldn't find one with stable v6.
[+] [-] calamari4065|2 years ago|reply
Mastodon is cool, your private instance can just link up to any other instance and get all the data. If you search for something, your instance will proxy the search back to the originating server. The experience is only trivially more annoying than just using one of the big servers.
Peertube is not like that. Notionally it supports all the same features, but when all the details come together, it just doesn't work.
Say you have a private instance and you just want to browse videos. How do you find remote content? You can have your server 'follow' another, duplicating its timeline into yours... If the remote server allows it. As a user, you can simply follow any channel anywhere and it will populate into your server's local timeline.
But what about search? You have to use a third party search index, and it's opt-in. Or you can go to each remote instance you know of and search there directly.
Assuming you have a bunch of content coming into your server somehow, how do you find something to watch? You don't! Most of the filtering and searching is useless. Your individual user subscription feed is the only thing even remotely reliable.
As much as I want to love PeerTube, I really, really hate it. Discoverability is so bad that the whole platform is nearly unusable.
Realistically I'm sure that the best results you can get is just from signing up to the largest instance you can find. Which really defeats the entire point of it being distributed and federated.
It really doesn't matter how many videos exist on the service if no one can find them. PeerTube is going to have to put some serious effort into this problem or they're going to fade into irrelevancy in a few years.
[+] [-] Dwedit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glenstein|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hutzlibu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelthelion|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xd1936|2 years ago|reply
Sad to see WebTorrent support go. I'm a big believer in the idea of Torrent over WebRTC, and PeerTube seemed like a great use of the technology. It really solves the "this video is going viral and I'm being hugged to death" problem. I haven't heard much about P2P HLS... Hope to hear more.
[+] [-] simbolit|2 years ago|reply
Do I misremember something, or has something substantially changed since then?
[+] [-] agumonkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seydor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sertbdfgbnfgsd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jelv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moreati|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tetris11|2 years ago|reply
0: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
[+] [-] rigelk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Almondsetat|2 years ago|reply
Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website.
Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings? Same
Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the video material? Same.
Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|2 years ago|reply
If I'm a small company, I'd use something like BunnyCDN to stream my videos, because no one else will watch them so the benefits of Peertube are not there.
If I'm a company and I'm large I should have no problems paying for something and again would use something like BunnyCDN.
[+] [-] Klonoar|2 years ago|reply
If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
[+] [-] halflings|2 years ago|reply
... the first image on the article linked here shows a monster called "Videorapter" with YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch logos, and calls for donations to "help push back Videoraptor"?
[+] [-] madeofpalk|2 years ago|reply
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
You mean apart from S3? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...
> Amazon S3 does not support the BitTorrent protocol in AWS Regions launched after May 30, 2016.
oh.
[+] [-] RHSeeger|2 years ago|reply
But I also wouldn't give it a name that, to the casual observer, makes it _sound_ like a rival to Twitter.
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mindwipe|2 years ago|reply
That video is likely to end up blocked by corporate users. If I'm a company I don't want to have my audience of potential customers looking things up on their lunch break reduced.
[+] [-] twosdai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] proactivesvcs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infecto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andsoitis|2 years ago|reply
Don't visitors need to watch the same videos at the same time for this benefit to materialize?
If so, it seems unlikely for the examples you mention (promo videos, conference recordings) and so I don't know that that is an effective selling point.
[+] [-] surajrmal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babypuncher|2 years ago|reply
It also doesn't help that, at least outside HN, every thread I see complaining about YouTube has commenters telling everyone to switch to PeerTube.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] immibis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|2 years ago|reply
YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.
The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?
These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com and immediately start watching.
[+] [-] sertbdfgbnfgsd|2 years ago|reply
Does anyone understand why exactly we don't have a _decentralized search_ for torrents?