3 ms·

What about using PeerTube and other technologies that utilize webtorrent in combination with WebRTC? People should help others stream videos while watching them

What about using PeerTube and other technologies that utilize webtorrent in combination with WebRTC? People should help others stream videos while watching them, rather than let a sole provider do all the heavy lifting.

lovvtide 6y ago
https://satellite.earth/ https://satellite.earth/ is doing exactly that. Using WebTorrent (over WebRTC) for the distribution layer and Ethereum as a decentralized an auth layer so people can digitally sign everything they upload and prove authorship of the data they're sharing with peers. @feross
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Peertube has been doing exactly that as well. I don't really see what Etherum brings to the table. You can have signatures without the weight of a blockchain. Actually not relying on one is more portable across isolated networks, and requires way less computing resources. Plus, blockchains are usually a privacy issue. I'm highly interested in the topics of decentralized (federated or distributed) platforms and identities, but I don't see what a single blockchain brings to the table? I could see profiles-as-blockchains, though, or instances-as-blockchains. But the rationale isn't clearly explained in the website, so it feels more of a buzzword and less of something that efficiently solves an issue (content discovery and global indexing, I guess). Lastly, would you mind stating your affiliation? Thanks :)
  - dkh 6y ago
    Just as an example of how crypto can help solve some problems in this arena see VideoCoin's proof system: (https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videocoin-storage-mining-4c8f8b79bb90 https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videocoin-stor... and https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-of-transcoding-as-a-new-consensus-mechanism-ca9ccf3fa168 https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-of-transcoding-as-a-new-c...) They are attempting to decentralize and distribute video encode/delivery, and a big piece of that is a poof of work implementation to incentivize and reward reliable nodes. Just one example, but there are others, and a lot of progress has been made to reduce the strain caused by throwing crypto into something that fundamentally needs to be very fast and lightweight to be usable. Edit: Corrected duplicate links
dkh 6y ago
While I'm a big fan of the concept and tech around p2p video, it has a number of flaws, the predominant one being that WebTorrent, etc. won't work at all unless the video being requested has a number of fast peers available right now to serve that content. (For browser-based things like Peer5 or BitChute's implementation, this translates to concurrent viewers of the same video, at the same time, thus only helps with very popular content.) Having users act as nodes that always store and share some chunk of content is a noble idea and a piece of the puzzle, but the scale required to support something like YouTube is very different than how simple it usually is to find a torrent of a popular recent film or whatever. Ensuring that the network also always has available an unpopular 6-hour video someone uploaded last year of some birds in their backyard is a lot harder. If users can't use your video platform without some basic guarantee that the video will even exist or have peers, this would likely be a much bigger problem than most people have with YouTube (though perhaps not philosophically). I personally feel that decentralization and shared distribution is likely the only way a viable alternative will be able to surface, survive, and not make the same mistakes, but we aren't there yet, and PeerTube is too simplistic of a solution. One potential piece of the puzzle that I'm closely following and casually involved with is VideoCoin (https://videocoin.io/ https://videocoin.io/) which distributes the expensive work of encoding videos across nodes, and aims to fully power the delivery of their livestreaming product the same way. (Yes, I know anything "blockchain" in 2020 is likely to force your eyes to roll, but it's actually a fantastic product and has made lots of progress.)
- danShumway 6y ago
  > Ensuring that the network also always has available an unpopular 6-hour video someone uploaded last year of some birds in their backyard is a lot harder. If users can't use your video platform without some basic guarantee that the video will even exist or have peers, this would likely be a much bigger problem than most people have with YouTube (though perhaps not philosophically). I'm not sure I follow. Peertube works without peers. I maintain an instance for my personal videos, most of them have maybe 5-6 views total, and they'll still work fine whenever anyone visits the server. The peers are only there to handle bandwidth spikes and scaling. And if you're worried that my server will go down, other instances can just mirror it. Of course, if I stop hosting the content and nobody else mirrors it, it will disappear. But from my understanding of VideoCoin, nothing seems to be different there at first glance. If I stop paying for people to host my video on VideoCoin, are random nodes just going to keep storing it for free? I'm trying to think of any distributed storage system that actually solves the problem of unknown content disappearing. Filecoin & IPFS don't remove the need to pay for storage, torrents still need to be seeded. The point isn't to make it impossible for content to vanish, the point is to make it easy for people who do care to archive and share the content that they care about.

lovvtide 6y ago

https://satellite.earth/ https://satellite.earth/ is doing exactly that. Using WebTorrent (over WebRTC) for the distribution layer and Ethereum as a decentralized an auth layer so people can digitally sign everything they upload and prove authorship of the data they're sharing with peers. @feross

MayeulC 6y ago
Peertube has been doing exactly that as well. I don't really see what Etherum brings to the table. You can have signatures without the weight of a blockchain. Actually not relying on one is more portable across isolated networks, and requires way less computing resources. Plus, blockchains are usually a privacy issue. I'm highly interested in the topics of decentralized (federated or distributed) platforms and identities, but I don't see what a single blockchain brings to the table? I could see profiles-as-blockchains, though, or instances-as-blockchains. But the rationale isn't clearly explained in the website, so it feels more of a buzzword and less of something that efficiently solves an issue (content discovery and global indexing, I guess). Lastly, would you mind stating your affiliation? Thanks :)
- dkh 6y ago
  Just as an example of how crypto can help solve some problems in this arena see VideoCoin's proof system: (https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videocoin-storage-mining-4c8f8b79bb90 https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videocoin-stor... and https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-of-transcoding-as-a-new-consensus-mechanism-ca9ccf3fa168 https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-of-transcoding-as-a-new-c...) They are attempting to decentralize and distribute video encode/delivery, and a big piece of that is a poof of work implementation to incentivize and reward reliable nodes. Just one example, but there are others, and a lot of progress has been made to reduce the strain caused by throwing crypto into something that fundamentally needs to be very fast and lightweight to be usable. Edit: Corrected duplicate links

dkh 6y ago

While I'm a big fan of the concept and tech around p2p video, it has a number of flaws, the predominant one being that WebTorrent, etc. won't work at all unless the video being requested has a number of fast peers available right now to serve that content. (For browser-based things like Peer5 or BitChute's implementation, this translates to concurrent viewers of the same video, at the same time, thus only helps with very popular content.) Having users act as nodes that always store and share some chunk of content is a noble idea and a piece of the puzzle, but the scale required to support something like YouTube is very different than how simple it usually is to find a torrent of a popular recent film or whatever. Ensuring that the network also always has available an unpopular 6-hour video someone uploaded last year of some birds in their backyard is a lot harder. If users can't use your video platform without some basic guarantee that the video will even exist or have peers, this would likely be a much bigger problem than most people have with YouTube (though perhaps not philosophically). I personally feel that decentralization and shared distribution is likely the only way a viable alternative will be able to surface, survive, and not make the same mistakes, but we aren't there yet, and PeerTube is too simplistic of a solution. One potential piece of the puzzle that I'm closely following and casually involved with is VideoCoin (https://videocoin.io/ https://videocoin.io/) which distributes the expensive work of encoding videos across nodes, and aims to fully power the delivery of their livestreaming product the same way. (Yes, I know anything "blockchain" in 2020 is likely to force your eyes to roll, but it's actually a fantastic product and has made lots of progress.)

danShumway 6y ago
> Ensuring that the network also always has available an unpopular 6-hour video someone uploaded last year of some birds in their backyard is a lot harder. If users can't use your video platform without some basic guarantee that the video will even exist or have peers, this would likely be a much bigger problem than most people have with YouTube (though perhaps not philosophically). I'm not sure I follow. Peertube works without peers. I maintain an instance for my personal videos, most of them have maybe 5-6 views total, and they'll still work fine whenever anyone visits the server. The peers are only there to handle bandwidth spikes and scaling. And if you're worried that my server will go down, other instances can just mirror it. Of course, if I stop hosting the content and nobody else mirrors it, it will disappear. But from my understanding of VideoCoin, nothing seems to be different there at first glance. If I stop paying for people to host my video on VideoCoin, are random nodes just going to keep storing it for free? I'm trying to think of any distributed storage system that actually solves the problem of unknown content disappearing. Filecoin & IPFS don't remove the need to pay for storage, torrents still need to be seeded. The point isn't to make it impossible for content to vanish, the point is to make it easy for people who do care to archive and share the content that they care about.