4 ms·

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

by 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.
- dkh 6y ago
  > But from my understanding of VideoCoin, nothing seems to be different there at first glance. I did not mean to imply that VideoCoin solves this issue, just that it is, in my opinion, a clever and functional solution to one or two pieces of this very large puzzle. > 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. My personal opinion is that anything truly viable and useful will need to do both, at least to the extent that this can be done. I have a huge problem with content availability being so dependent on popularity (and likely also temporal factors) and don't really think a system that doesn't inherently support content longevity (whether peers like the content or not) could be considering a big improvement over YouTube or centralized options. If I had my way, I think a hybrid approach of some sort would be the place to start -- let peers explicitly choose to mirror and help distribute content they care about, but also force all nodes to also devote some % of whatever they're allocating to the platform to mirroring anything the network has chosen to give them after various calculations intended to maximize data integrity and performance.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  Yet I look at my youtube saved lists and there's so many "deleted video" or "this video has been removed" entries. You can't even see what the title was. Right now I think of any video on youtube as temporary and archive any videos I think there's any chance of wanting to watch later using youtube-dl.

by dkh 6y ago

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.

dkh 6y ago
> But from my understanding of VideoCoin, nothing seems to be different there at first glance. I did not mean to imply that VideoCoin solves this issue, just that it is, in my opinion, a clever and functional solution to one or two pieces of this very large puzzle. > 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. My personal opinion is that anything truly viable and useful will need to do both, at least to the extent that this can be done. I have a huge problem with content availability being so dependent on popularity (and likely also temporal factors) and don't really think a system that doesn't inherently support content longevity (whether peers like the content or not) could be considering a big improvement over YouTube or centralized options. If I had my way, I think a hybrid approach of some sort would be the place to start -- let peers explicitly choose to mirror and help distribute content they care about, but also force all nodes to also devote some % of whatever they're allocating to the platform to mirroring anything the network has chosen to give them after various calculations intended to maximize data integrity and performance.
brokenmachine 6y ago
Yet I look at my youtube saved lists and there's so many "deleted video" or "this video has been removed" entries. You can't even see what the title was. Right now I think of any video on youtube as temporary and archive any videos I think there's any chance of wanting to watch later using youtube-dl.