The decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 5.0 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:
- In order to increase the protection of internal and confidential videos, the organization of video storage in the file system has been changed. Internal videos are now stored in a separate private/ subdirectory, direct access to which is limited at the nginx settings level and all file requests are redirected through the PeerTube authentication system. In object storage, internal videos are restricted via ACLs and are not accessible when proxied. Upgrading old installations to PeerTube 5.0 requires running scripts to transfer files, change PeerTube settings (config/production.yaml) and nginx configuration.
- Incompatible changes have been made to the REST API. Extended API for plugins and themes.
- The ability to install test versions of plugins (alpha, beta and release candidates) has been added to the command line utilities.
- The ability to save live broadcasts in the storage object is provided, which allows you to store and stream live streams through external cloud storage when running PeerTube on your own servers with limited disk space and low network bandwidth.
- Added support for connecting to PeerTube using two-factor authentication based on one-time passwords (OTP, One Time Password) and authenticator programs such as Authy, Google Authenticator and FreeOTP.
- Enhanced user interface capabilities. The menu "My Videos" provides the display of channels and the mention of the playlist in which the video was added. A link to channels has been added to the left panel. Added filter to sort videos by name. An information block about object storage and links to video files have been added to the admin interface. Added clarifications about disk space usage with quotas.
The PeerTube platform is based on the WebTorrent BitTorrent client, which 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 content delivery 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 1100 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