The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 4.0 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 admin interface offers a new tabular view of all videos hosted on the current server. The new interface allows you to perform administration and moderation-related actions in batch mode, applying operations such as deletion, transcoding, and blocking to multiple selected videos at once.
- To simplify the selection of videos for batch processing, the ability to filter and group items using advanced filters that allow you to separate local and external videos, and sort by various criteria, such as publication date, HLS/WebTorrent usage, and account status, is offered.
- For administrators, the ability to filter logs by tags and set their own restrictions for individual channels has also been added.
- For video creators, an interface for viewing subscribers and filtering video lists in channels is provided. The user can now also perform operations on several items at once, for example, you can delete or block all marked subscribers at once.
- Provided the ability to transcode to 144p video, which can be useful for very poor communication channels or for publishing podcasts.
- Added support for RTMPS (Real Time Messaging Protocol over TLS) streaming data transfer protocol.
- Added ability to use Markdown text in playlist descriptions.
- Improved display of videos taken with a smartphone in vertical format.
- Extraction operations have been optimized using the ActivityPub protocol.
- Added support for yt-dlp utility, now recommended due to youtube-dl maintenance stagnation.
- Added create-move-video-storage-jobs script to automate moving local videos to object storage.
- A lot of work has been done to clean up and modernize the code, settings and API.
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 900 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