Release of decentralized video broadcasting platform PeerTube 1.3

Published issue Peer Tube 1.3, a decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting. PeerTube offers a vendor-independent alternative to YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo, using a content distribution network based on P2P communication and linking visitor browsers. Project achievements extend licensed under AGPLv3.

PeerTube is based on the use of a BitTorrent client webtorrent, launched in a browser and using technology WebRTC to organize a direct P2P communication channel between browsers, and a protocol Activity Pub, which allows you to combine disparate video servers into a common federated network in which visitors participate in the delivery of content and have the ability to subscribe to channels and receive notifications about new videos. The web interface provided by the project is built using the framework Angular.

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 (using the protocol webseed). 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.

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.

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 your own server. For quick server deployment, a pre-configured Docker image (chocobozzz/peertube) is provided. Currently running for content posting 332 servers maintained by various volunteers and organizations.

The main innovations of release 1.3:

• Added support for video playlists through which the user can create a playlist for delayed viewing.
  It is possible to create both private and public playlists. Each entry can not only define a video clip, but also refer to a position to start and end playback. Unlike channels, playlists cannot be a subscription object, but are a means of individual viewing organization. In the playlist, you can include not only your own, but also other people's videos. The streaming_playlists setting has been added to the production.yaml configuration file, which defines the directory for saving playlists;

• Added the function of quarantining videos (when enabled, uploaded videos are automatically added to the blacklist and excluded from it after reviewing);
• Added experimental protocol support Hls (HTTP Live Streaming), which allows you to adaptively control the flow depending on the bandwidth. To use HLS, each resolution requires a separate video file to be uploaded. Supported with FFmpeg 4 or newer;
• Expanded subscriber management options. Added support for deleting a subscriber, blocking the creation of new subscriptions, manually adding subscribers and sending notifications about new subscribers;
• Improved user interface. The height of the playback area has been increased, the design of the buttons has been changed, the size of the thumbnails has been increased,
  Added "My Library" section to the menu, improved display on mobile devices, added new animated effects;

• The administrator interface now has the ability to disable the tracker (prohibition of working in P2P mode), change / reset user passwords, view server logs, diagnose network problems, limit the size of the history of watched videos and delete old records about external videos.

Source: opennet.ru