The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 3.1 was released. PeerTube offers a vendor-independent alternative to YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo, using a content distribution network based on P2P communication and linking visitor browsers. The developments of the project are distributed under the AGPLv3 license.
Main innovations:
- Expanded the ability to transcode audio and video from one format to another to ensure the availability of content on all devices (transcoding is carried out in the background, so the new video becomes available to all devices not immediately, but after some time required to complete the transcoding). The new release adds support for transcoding profiles that can be used to modify the transcoding rules on a specific PeerTube site. Profiles are packaged as plugins, and typically provide different settings for FFmpeg. The site administrator can now select a transcoding profile that suits current needs. For example, you can create transcoding profiles to optimize bandwidth or to deliver the highest quality audio.
Processes for managing transcoding tasks have been modernized. Previously, content was queued and re-encoded in the order the user added it. The new release provides the administrator with tools to set the priority of work execution and the ability to automatically reduce the priority depending on the number of downloaded videos (in the first place, single downloads will be recoded, shifting users who have downloaded a large number of videos at once). The administrator can monitor the progress of the transcoding and set the number of tasks to run at the same time.
- In the web interface, the “most liked” category was removed from the sidebar, which was replaced by the “trending” section, which offers three options for selecting the most popular videos: hot (recent videos with which users interacted the most), views (the most viewed videos for last 24 hours) and likes (videos with the most likes).
- Some elements have been changed in the site administrator interface, for example, the tab with the list of users has been changed and the button for creating a user has been moved to the left side. Added the ability to configure the total and daily quota for the amount of downloaded data.
- Simplified subscription to accounts hosted on another site, if you have your own account on that site - now you just need to click the "subscribe" button under the video and enter your ID to subscribe.
- Added a setting for simultaneously running import tasks (downloading by URL or via torrent) to the host administrator interface.
- A system for creating torrents for downloaded videos has been implemented, which works in asynchronous mode.
- Dropped support for the PostgreSQL 9.6 release, deprecated support for Node.js 10, and added support for the new Node.js14 and 15 branches.
Recall that PeerTube is based on the use of a WebTorrent BitTorrent client that runs in a browser and uses WebRTC technology to organize a direct P2P communication channel between browsers, and the ActivityPub protocol, which allows you to combine disparate video servers into a common federated network in which visitors participate in delivery content and have the ability to subscribe to channels and receive notifications of new videos. The web interface provided by the project is built using the Angular framework.
The PeerTube federated network is formed as a community of interconnected small video hosting servers, each of which has its own administrator and can adopt its own rules. Each server with video plays the role of a BitTorrent tracker, which hosts the user accounts of this server and their videos. The user ID is in the form "@user_name@server_domain". Browsing data is transmitted directly from the browsers of other visitors viewing the content.
If no one is watching the video, the return is organized by the server to which the video was originally uploaded (the WebSeed protocol is used). In addition to distributing traffic between users watching videos, PeerTube also allows hosts launched by authors to host videos for the first time to cache other authors' videos, forming a distributed network of not only clients, but also servers, as well as providing fault tolerance. There is support for live streaming with content delivery in P2P mode (typical programs such as OBS can be used to control streaming).
To start broadcasting via PeerTube, the user only needs to upload a video, a description, and a set of tags to one of the servers. After that, the movie will be available on the entire federated network, and not just from the primary download server. To work with PeerTube and participate in the distribution of content, a regular browser is enough and no additional software is required. Users can track activity in selected video channels by subscribing to feeds of interest on federated social networks (such as Mastodon and Pleroma) or via RSS. To distribute video using P2P communications, the user can also add a special widget with a built-in web player to his site.
Currently, there are about 700 servers, maintained by various volunteers and organizations, for hosting content. If a user is not satisfied with the rules for placing videos on a particular PeerTube server, he can connect to another server or run his own server. For quick server deployment, a pre-configured Docker image (chocobozzz/peertube) is provided.
Source: opennet.ru