The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 3.3 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:
- Provided the ability to create your own home page for each instance of PeerTube. On the home page, you can provide information about the site, available content, destination, and subscriptions. Adding a home page is done via the Administration/ Configuration/ Homepage menu in Markdown or HTML format. It is possible to integrate buttons, a video player, playlists, video thumbnails and channels into the page. Embedded video lists are updated automatically.
- Added support for searching playlists, which are now reflected in search results when navigating in PeerTube and when using the Sepia Search engine.
- Added support for publishing shortened links to videos and playlists. Regular 36-character video IDs can now be published in 22-character format, and instead of "/videos/watch/" and "/videos/watch/playlist/" paths, you can specify "/w/" and "/w/p/" .
- Performance optimization has been carried out. Extracting video information is now twice as fast. Faster execution of federated queries. Work is underway to identify problems in systems with a very large number of users, video and links to other nodes.
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