The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 3.2 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:
- The interface has been redesigned to provide a more visible separation of channels and accounts, for example so that the user can immediately understand that they are on the channel page and not the user page. Channel avatars are now displayed in a square format, and user avatars in a circle format, so as not to confuse channels and the accounts of their owners. On the right side of the channel pages, a block with information about the owner has been added, when clicked on, a page listing the channels of this user is displayed. The design of channel pages has also been optimized to differentiate different channels more prominently, with the ability to pin a channel-specific banner and support button to the top. In video thumbnails, the channel is displayed first and the video thumbnail size has been increased by a third.
- For users who are not logged into an account, support for automatically continuing playback from an interrupted position has been implemented.
- The video upload interface in PeerTube has been modernized. The download can now be interrupted, for example due to a loss of Internet connection, and resumed after some time.
- The default video download settings have been changed; when you click on the βDownloadβ button, the process of direct file transfer now starts, rather than sending a torrent download.
- The interface has added the ability to sort videos uploaded by the user according to criteria such as publication date, number of views and duration.
- Implemented a notification for administrators about the availability of a new release of PeerTube and the availability of plugin updates.
- In the video viewer embedded on pages, the context menu shown when right-clicking is expanded. For example, small explanatory icons and a statistics block with technical information for advanced users have been added.
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.
There are currently more than 900 servers running content hosted by various volunteers and organizations. 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