release , a decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and broadcasting. PeerTube offers an independent alternative to YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo, utilizing a content distribution network based on P2P communications and linking browsers of visitors to each other. The project's developments is licensed under AGPLv3.
PeerTube is based on the use of the BitTorrent client , launched in the browser and using technology to establish a direct P2P communication channel between browsers, and the protocol , which allows disparate video servers to unite into a federated network, where visitors participate in content delivery and can subscribe to channels and receive notifications about new videos. The web interface provided by the project is built using the framework .
The PeerTube federated network forms as a consortium of interconnected small video hosting servers, each having its own administrator and can accept its own rules. Each video server acts as a BitTorrent tracker, where user accounts of this server and their videos are hosted. User identifiers are formed in the format ‘@username@server_domain’. Data transmission during viewing is done directly from the browsers of other visitors watching the content.
If no one is watching the video, the server to which the video was originally uploaded organizes the delivery (the protocol used is ). In addition to distributing traffic among users watching videos, PeerTube also allows nodes launched by authors for primary video hosting to cache videos from other authors, forming a distributed network not only of clients but also of servers, thus ensuring fault tolerance.
To start broadcasting via PeerTube, a user only needs to upload a video, a description, and a set of tags to one of the servers. After that, the video will be available across the entire federated network, not just from the primary upload server. Using PeerTube and participating in content distribution only requires a regular browser, and no additional software installation is needed. Users can track activities in their chosen video channels by subscribing to interesting channels in federated social networks (such as Mastodon and Pleroma) or through RSS. To distribute video using P2P communications, users can also add a special widget with an embedded web player to their website.
Currently, content hosting has been initiated on servers, supported by various volunteers and organizations.
If a user is not satisfied with the video posting rules on a specific PeerTube server, they can connect to another server or your own server. A preconfigured Docker image (chocobozzz/peertube) is provided for quick server deployment.
In the new release:
- Experimental support has been added for plugins and themes that can be installed through the administrator's web interface. Each instance of PeerTube can select its own theme (the administrator uploads themes, after which they become available for user activation);
- Support for uploading audio files has been added. PeerTube will create a video from them using a static image, merging the audio file with the album cover and file parameters;
- Support for multi-step user registration has been implemented. New users can create their own channel (username/channel) themselves. By default, the user's channel page is displayed instead of the account's homepage;
- Support has been added for using muted, loop, and peertubeLink parameters in the URL;
- The video publishing interface has been redesigned, adding the ability to set start and end playback times, subtitles, and flags for automatic and loop playback;
- Chronological display of subscriber groups and recently added videos has been provided;
- A language filter has been added to display videos only in certain languages;
- The ability to convert public, unlisted, or unpublished videos and playlists to private has been added;
- Support for re-encoding videos in 4K quality has been implemented;
- Support for federated deletion of comments (on other servers) removed by the video owner has been ensured;
- The ability to set an administrator password during the first launch has been added;
- The security issue caused by moderators being able to create and modify privileged user settings has been resolved. From now on, moderator actions are limited to regular users only.
- CLI utilities have been moved to a separate package to reduce server dependency size.
- The performance of static file caching has been improved, and font rendering has been accelerated.
Source: opennet.ru
