The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 3.4 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:
- A new filtering system has been implemented that works on any video page, including account pages, channels, recently added and trending videos. In addition to the previously available sorting modes, the ability to sort and filter by language, age restrictions, source (local videos and materials from other servers), type (live, VOD) and categories has been added. To manage filters, a special button has been added to the upper left corner of each video page.
- Added the ability to subscribe an entire site to a specific channel or account without enabling federation to the site hosting the selected channel or user. Subscription is done in the admin menu via the Following section in the Federation tab.
- Provided support for filtering search results by sites from which found videos are distributed. For example, if you know that a certain node has a well-formed collection on a certain topic, you can limit the results to only that node.
- Updated the HLS.js library used in the PeerTube video player. The bandwidth of the user's communication channel is determined and remembered, which allows you to immediately start transmission in high or low quality, instead of using the default medium quality level and rolling back to an acceptable resolution only after a few seconds.
- Added built-in support for saving video files to object stores such as Amazon S3, allowing site administrators to store videos on systems that dynamically allocate space based on user demand.
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