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Moving from YouTube to PeerTube
- _hao 6y agoViemo = Vimeo. I was thrown off at the start until I realized that's the platform the author meant.
- jychang 6y agoThe proofreading for this article is atrocious.
- netsharc 6y agoAt least the misspelling is consistent, except for the mention of "Vimeo Pro". Maybe the author thinks the video service "Viemo" sells the pro account with that name..
- djsumdog 6y agoFixed. Thanks!
- de_watcher 6y ago"the dominate", "incoming coming", and there are some other typos I'm not sure about.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI like the idea of PeerTube, but every time I try to play a video, it buffers to the point of being unwatchable.
- simias 6y agoStreaming video is hard and expensive, I think that's why there's very little serious competition to Youtube. You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still manage to turn a profit. Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has like 20 views. I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You need huge economies of scale to make it work. Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search, video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.
- akerro 6y agoCan I encode video to one format, like webm, and only serve this format without reendocing specifically for a client? Force all clients to watch only in resolutions in which the file is available on disk? It would deduct CPU/GPU time and only need to get storage and network, which isn't that expensive. I have a few dedicated kimsufi servers that are under-utilized.
- kevincox 6y agoYou can. But now most of your clients will burn battery because they don't have hardware VP8, VP9 or AV1 decoding (yet). IIUC these are the only video codecs supported by WebM and they have very little hardware support. Of course this problem exists for any particular codec that you chose it is either nonfree, inefficient or not universally supported. And after that some of your clients will have terrible buffering because your video file is too large. Other clients will have a 4k TV and your file will be too small. Unless your bandwidth is very cheap you will also spend more money sending your 1080 video to phones with a 720p screen. So yes you can. But there is a reason that every serious video service has multiple codecs, every client has a different ideal video file and by getting close to that you will provide a better experience.
- akerro 6y agoI meant webm as an example, anything else works as long as the file will be encoded once and then directly streamed without reencoding
- kevincox 6y agoMy point is that any one encode won't be sufficient. WebM is actually probably one of the better options for a single encoding. But any single choice of codec and parameters will be insufficient to provide a top-tier user experience.
- mekkkkkk 6y agoNot sure what you mean with reencoding for each client? AFAIK no major streaming does this realtime. They reencode the content once from source into a number of bitrates and formats, put the result on a CDN and then use DASH/HLS/Smooth so clients can dynamically fetch and switch between them based on a manifest. If you do not do DRM you can probably get away with only using HLS or DASH and three or so bitrates/qualities. 480p, 720p and source perhaps? That might double your storage req and the one time encode effort, but running costs are the same (if not less because people will consume less bandwidth).
- shaan7 6y agoMaybe it depends on the peers near you and when you watch. I tried to play a video on the OP's website, it played immediately at 1080p without any stutter.
- ElijahLynn 6y agoThat was my usual experience too, however, I think the article site is hosting their own. e.g. if you click from that article to a sample peertube embed, https://battlepenguin.com/tech/video/upgrading-the-ssd-on-an-msi-gs60-laptop/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/video/upgrading-the-ssd-on-an..., it played instantly for me. Fastest I have ever seen PeerTube work, just as fast as YouTube actually. I didn't know that was possible! So it does appear that hosting your own videos allows for instant streaming on PeerTube, no buffering!
- djsumdog 6y agoAuthor here. I host on a dedicated server in Germany; 64GB of ram and a recent generation processor. It costs less than all my crappy Vultr/DigitalOcean nodes, so I moved a ton of stuff to it. You do need a decent VM or dedicated server for PeerTube, but they're not that expensive if you shop around. I pay ~€60 a month.
- bserge 6y agoWhy use PeerTube at all if you can just stream directly from server? In theory, more viewers = more bandwidth, but it doesn't seem to work that well in practice.
- zucker42 6y agoPeerTube's reasonably good browser interface and federation features are good reasons to use it.
- antepodius 6y agoThe torrent system's nice if it works, but the main draw is having a nice interface and being able to host your own stuff.
- ryan29 6y agoHey. It's really neat. Would you be willing to share any insight you have? I don't know much about PeerTube. I assume your server is along the lines of an anchor / primary peer that guarantees there's always 1 seed. Is that right? If so, is there a way to turn off the peer-to-peer capabilities and to use it like a more traditional video hosting platform? > It makes more sense for someone just starting out to host their own content, than a creator who is entrenched in the YouTube world. I've thought about that concept for (literally) at least 2 years and I've always wanted to build a how-to website that helps creators do what they can to mitigate the risks of being de-platformed, etc.. Have you thought at all about ways to use YouTube to externalize costs initially, but with a plan to eventually migrate premium users to a platform where you'd get a better business relationship? I think Linus Tech Tips has the right idea with FloatPlane where they cater to creators that are already popular and help them syphon those creators' premium users away from YouTube. Do you think there's any way a completely new creator could start out with extremely low ongoing costs? ~€60 a month is too expensive for high school kids and I think that's about the only age where you'd (possibly) have a chance to start capturing the market in terms of mindshare. Even by then, it might be too late. A lot of really young kids have YouTube channels and are already captured by Google. By the time they're in high school they've already got a half decade of "investment" into YouTube. Any thoughts on that?
- ferros 6y agoYouTube’s unassailable feature is discovery. Would be great to see competition in video hosting though.
- agumonkey 6y agoone day jungle will be trendy again searching and being surprised is cool
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- bryanrasmussen 6y agodiscovery is really a function of having all the content, so yes you cannot assail the function of having all the content until you have a significant amount of content.
- kevincox 6y agoNot necessarily. Some service could crawl a bunch of video sites and provide an index and set of recommendations.
- Risse 6y agoI have been working on Peertube search index, and recommendations are definitely next in the to-do list https://peertube-search.com/ https://peertube-search.com/
- robertlagrant 6y agoI went to English and got a load of Downfall parodies, followed by something to do with escaping the "Luciferean state". 2/10 would not recommend (yet).
- als0 6y ago"However, self-hosting might also be the only alternative, if Google decides to ban you from their platform" I'm not familiar with the YouTuber industry but this scenario sounds like a death knell. Are there popular video bloggers that aren't on YouTube?
- jachell 6y agoI haven't used it, but maybe TikTok?
- erk__ 6y agoI don't know of any in the west, but in Japan and China (though youtube being banned helps) there are other popular video sites, for example NicoNico in Japan and YouKu in China.
- Funes- 6y agoI only know of one "YouTuber" with a considerable amount of subscribers [0] who is uploading all of his content to PeerTube and wants to eventually move there exclusively. [0] https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/video-channels/luke_channel/videos https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/video-channels/luke_channel/vid...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 6y ago> Are there popular video bloggers that aren't on YouTube? Rogan, but he's moving to Spotify with a big check.
- metiscus 6y agoChemPlayer basically had so many videos taken down that he moved off platform.
- swiley 6y agoI thought they deleted his account last summer. Personally that seems so weird. The amateur chem videos where what got me to start subscribing to YouTube channels.
- m4r35n357 6y agoHere comes the new dot com, same as the old dot com . . .
- natex 6y agoAs it relies on P2P, watching a PeerTube video exposes your IP to anyone who wants it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289
- ihuman 6y agoAre there any p2p services that don't do that? I thought you need a peer's IP when using any p2p service?
- white-flame 6y agoAny p2p system over an anonymity framework like Tor or I2P would meet that criteria.
- zo1 6y agoTor? Freenet? Maybe Peertube over Tor?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 6y agoYou are exposing your IP to Google when you visit Youtube.
- natex 6y agoI don't understand this argument. Google is a subset of everyone.
- ekianjo 6y agoI think Google, as an entity, has a lot more power to collect a lot more data about everyone else in the world and do something with it than my neighbor sniffing my IP address when I visit a singular Peertube Instance. I'd like to hear your counter argument on that.
- MichaelApproved 6y agoThe article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t do justice to just how strong it can be. Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature. From the article: > “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.” Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify. Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority. There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.
- pjc50 6y ago> Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature. Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
- once-in-a-while 6y agoBy "conspiracy", do you mean the psy-ops created by 3 letter agencies, or the Truth which most people prefer not to know, because too depressing? There /is/ a bad "elite" out there (not going into details), which people, when confronted, prefer not to know... The Truth Pill is by far the hardest to swallow. You need Real Courage to do so, and you don't seem to be in that league...
- calvinmorrison 6y agoWe've seen a massive movement for companies to post warnings or alerts stating facts might not back up certain content on social media in the last year or so. Fact Checkers they're called. Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
- tempsy 6y agoanecdotally youtube seems to have aggressively increased the number of ads just in the last few weeks or so i see ads on almost all videos i watch now, there are two ads before the video (the first one i can’t skip at all, the second i can sometimes skip after a few seconds), and then some videos have more ads at different points in the actual video that show up out of nowhere. and then there’s the search ads that take up the entire mobile interface plus ads beneath the video given i’ve mostly been using youtube for recipes lately and skip around the video a lot the experience is like being forced watching 30 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content. it’s completely completely unbearable
- paulie_a 6y agoYou can pay a nominal fee and not get ads.
- Kye 6y agoYou aren't imagining it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291
- localhost 6y agoYouTube Premium is by far the best $10/month that I spend. Zero ads on YouTube and creators get a share of that, which is typically more $ than they would get from ads.
- ekianjo 6y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214
- jaimex2 6y agoI can only ever see a large company like Amazon or Facebook try to take on Youtube sucesfully. They have the server capacity/capability and have more than enough capital to try and incentivise creators across if they think the venture is worth it, which it probably isn't.
- tracker1 6y agoFacebook tried, and was incredibly deceptive about the numbers. I'm not sure I'd like Amazon any better... they really need to improve the UI/UX of the video services they already offer.
- jaimex2 6y agoYeah, I recall College Humor attributing the deceptive FB stats as something that hurt their focus on what was important to stay alive come to think of it.
- ElijahLynn 6y agoThe article can be improved by embedding an example video.
- kmeisthax 6y ago>An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to other audience members watching it at the same time. This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like. Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.
- ekianjo 6y agoOr, alternatively, you just stay connected to a VPN when you browse the web, and stop worrying about this aspect. (yes, I know, VPNs are not the silver bullet they are advertised to be, but in this particular case they are helpful).
- akersten 6y agoWouldn't I , as a user, have the same DMCA safe harbor as long as I stopped streaming the video if I were to receive one of those letters?
- LeegleechN 6y agoTo have the DMCA safe harbor you have to submit a form at the copyright office and follow certain procedures. It's not automatic the way copyright itself is.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
- jmartrican 6y agoIs the premise here that the author wants to move away from YouTube because YouTube removes racist or violent promoting, or fake news posts? If PeerTube doesnt block these videos, then I rather stick with YouTube.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoPeerTube effectively doesn't block anything... It's just a piece of software. PeerTubes can connect to other instances of PeerTube or other fediverse servers like Mastodon... and those other servers will likely block a server posting harmful content. But they can't take down a PeerTube posting harmful content, that'd be up to the hosting provider.
- sbussard 6y agoI remember the internet before google - when you would search for anything there would be like a 25% chance that a given search result would be a porn site targeted for random keywords. Google has done a great job figuring out content curation at scale. A competitor for any of their services would need a suite of hard-to-implement features to be viable, including discoverability and content filtration. Are there any good open source solutions to solve these problems? Bonus points if they’ve been proven at scale
- arp242 6y agoYears ago (and I think this was actually Google Video, and not YouTube) I was helping a customer who had trouble playing videos on the internet. I think it was one of those "it sometimes stops after a minute or so" problems. I fixed the problem with flash player and to test it I went video.google.com and clicked on a random video on the frontpage without paying much attention to what it was, and continued working on the next laptop while keeping half an eye on the video. This is how I learned about R. Budd Dwyer killing himself on live TV in 1987, as the video was the recording of him shooting himself in the head. I think a lot of people underestimate the kind of challenges YouTube faces at their scale.
- jrnichols 6y agoI'm amazed that peer tube isn't full of porn by now too.
- RealStickman_ 6y agoIt probably is, but afaik you can't see videos from random creators on your peertube instance. You have to subscribe to them to get a feed of their videos.
- vanderZwan 6y agoJust checked out the main site - on top of trending is a seven-second clip of a headless woman showing off her cleaveage. Remember when YouTube had to fix that problem?
- de_watcher 6y agoEvery time youtube breaks the old UI current workaround I start looking for alternatives.
- jhallenworld 6y agoWell here is another direction I recently learned about: Amazon Prime Video Direct: https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440 https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440 I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06 / hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour). Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that there are no ads. I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect YouTube remains king for discovery. Here are the videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by-Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by-Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW
- bagacrap 6y agohow much do content creators on YouTube get paid when premium users watch their videos?
- donmcronald 6y agoWhat kind of money is that for the space? Assuming a 10 minute video where you want to make $100 you need 100k views. $100 / $.006 per hour = 16667 hours. 16667 hours * 6 10 minute views per hour = 100000. Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1 per 1000 minutes). Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off? I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive. YouTube must be a huge money pit.
- jhallenworld 6y agoWait, it's .06 not .006 per hour, so 10K views of a 10 minute for $100. Wow, serving video is expensive. I had no idea it was $.06 / hour. I presume Amazon and YouTube have their own CDN or something.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoYou are missing an important link here, peertube does P2P ON DEMAND. You "CAN" disable it and you are out of the p2p scene. Dont know why people here seem to equate peertube=p2p=insecure.
- simias 6y agoI don't equate p2p with insecure but what's the point of turning it off? If you do that aren't you better off just hosting some basic HTML/CSS/JS to serve your videos directly from your self-hosted website without bothering with PeerTube? Maybe I'm missing the point but I though the advantage of PeerTube was using P2P file sharing to cut down on the huge amount of bandwidth necessary for video streaming.
- antepodius 6y agoYou can disable it client-side if you, the viewer, don't want your ip visible to the peers. As it's opt-out, most people won't do it, so the host can still reap the benefit of the p2p system. Aside from that, another goal of peertube is the ability to federate instances together so that a search on one site can return results from all federated ones. The hope is to build a decentralised, federated youtube competitor.
- 293984j29384 6y agoDoes anyone else thing this is a terrible name? Reading the topic, I immediately went to peertube.org/.com/.net to check it out. Turns out it's really just software for self hosting your own videos.
- guerrilla 6y ago> Turns out it's really just software for self hosting your own videos. Not exactly, since you can join a node and upload there and it's also like Mastadon in that it's federated.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anticensor 6y agoSee: https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org https://peertube.fr https://peertube.fr
- guerrilla 6y agoYes? https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances Some of those are federated with eachother and you can upload to them and your videos are stored on the instance. You do not need to run your own instance but obviously it can be helpful.
- zelly 6y ago> It’s 2020 and YouTube, as well as the rest of big tech, is continuing to remove content they don’t agree with from their platforms. Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's a matter of when it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.
- wolco 6y agoPiratebay did a good job of self-replicating itself and outlives many others.
- callesgg 6y agoThe infohashes are there but there are No seeders on the torrents.
- efjsejkrtwejktw 6y agoWorks fine for me? There are certainly some seedless torrents still indexed, but TPB has a lot of good torrents, and is my goto for Jeopardy (among other things).
- zelly 6y agoDownloading content like the most recent Jeopardy is where torrents shine. Also recent blockbuster movies and AAA games. Torrents can be faster than a CDN in these cases, because they are popular content. Try to download Jeopardy from Feb 29, 2014, good luck if anyone's seeding that. But I'm sure NBC's paid streaming service has that episode if you want it.
- zelly 6y agoYes, the website and its database are resilient. Torrents are less likely to be struck down by a singular authority like YouTube but on the other hand it suffers from the same problem as personal websites. Almost every torrent posted to tpb over the years, if you tried to download now, would have zero seeders. It's the same thing with IPFS. None of these P2P solutions will ever be like S3.
- freeopinion 6y agoThis is a complete aside, but what are some examples of other acquisitions that have lived on as well as Youtube after they were bought? I mean, there is of course that time when Apple was taken over by Next. What are some other standout acquisition survivals?
- FirstLvR 6y agoi've tried using peerTube a couple times, but the discovery system is totally broken even if you setup the main language to english a bunch of other languages keep poping up on top on every search the only reason youtube is so good now is because is tied with google, thus making the search/discovery process fully efficient and am sorry my friends, thats exactly what am looking for
- LockAndLol 6y agoOnce peertube starts using distributed storage and goes onto I2P or other anonymous networks, I think paid services can kiss their asses bye bye. Good on battlepenguin to join the movement.
- rch 6y agoGoogle should spin off YouTube.
- anticensor 6y agoYouTube runs at a loss.
- ireflect 6y agoI have been looking for a good video aggregator website. Something like digg, but for videos. Most of the videos would naturally link to youtube, which is fine, but they could just as easily link to peertube, vimeo, self-hosted, etc. This would solve a number of problems: 1. Better (or at least a different) way of discovering. I'm a pretty heavy YouTube watcher, but my recommendations are bland and full of reruns. It knows what I've been interested in the past but I find them tiresome. It does a terrible job of recommending new things that I might find interesting. It needs to take more chances. 2. As many have already said, there are plenty of ways to host a video but none of them have good discoverability. If there was a good video aggregator site, it would help to begin diversifying this aspect. Even better, it could be successful even without convincing content creators to use it directly, because much of the content could still just link to YouTube. Does such a site exist? One that I've found is browsing lobste.rs' [video] tag, or HN for the youtube.com domain, but that's not really the same.
- BadassFractal 6y agoIs there a way to become a node for PeerTube, and help the cause with your CPU and bandwidth?
- jrnichols 6y agoThis is kind of close .. become a redundant peer https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute-architecture?id=redundancy-between-instances https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute-architecture?id=r...
- suyash 6y agoWhat's a cheap, reliable way to have cloud backups for videos?
- ns5049520 6y ago+1 for decentralization.
- jhatemyjob 6y agoI don't understand why (other than Stallman religious reasons) you would go through the effort of hosting a PeerTube instance when you could just serve a static video file and call it a day
- puskavi 6y agoLBRY has done the same pretty well.
- prvc 6y ago>PeerTube does this using technologies such as WebTorrent and WebRTC. In theory, this can help PeerTube scale without expensive centralized servers. I wonder if this is actually that useful for reducing server bandwidth for the long-tail type of content that self-hosters are apt to produce.
- coopsmgoops 6y agoSpotify used P2P in the early days for this reason I belive. Worked out for them.
- mdale 6y agoWould have been nice if the article could have embedded a video towards making a statement of ease of use of peer tube :)
- skinnyasianboi 6y agoIf you like PeerTube please check out LBRY, too. It goes a step further and is even more decentralized and doesn't rely on server instances like the one you have setup.