The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 4.1 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:
- Improved performance of the built-in video player on mobile devices. When you touch the center, a pop-up block of buttons is shown, allowing you to control playback without using the bottom panel. The size of the bottom panel has been increased to make it easier to work with touch screens. When viewing in full screen mode, landscape mode is automatically turned on when the screen is rotated. Added the ability to fast forward and rewind 10 seconds by double-tapping the right or left edge of the player.
- Provided the ability to develop plugins for integrating arbitrary pages into the PeerTube interface and adding custom fields to the video update form shown in the video information tab.
- Additional search result filters have been added to show only videos, channels, or playlists in the output. With the help of filters, for example, it is convenient to find channels or playlists on certain topics.
- Expanded options for configuring PeerTube servers. Administrators can now define the default privacy type applied to uploaded videos (for example, instead of "public" type, you can select "unlisted", "private" and "internal" types), set the default license for content, and disable certain functionality (for example , prohibit uploading videos or sending comments).
- The ability to disable the use of the default P2P delivery protocol for popular videos has been provided in order to reduce server load by involving users in content distribution. P2P mode can also be disabled for video embedded in external web pages.
- Implemented the ability to customize the behavior of the login form and display buttons in the login form for available authentication plugins, as well as automatic redirection to an external authentication platform when the login button is pressed.
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