12 ms·

PeerTube v6

397 points by p4bl0 3y ago

glenstein 3y ago
Truly inspiring work from Framasoft! I just hope for more adoption. I don't know if anyone remembers the days of Firefox 2 and 3 and the days of "community marketing" but I think something like that could be a worthwhile project here. I would love, for instance, if significant creators could do a Framasoft February each year where they commit to hosting some portion of videos of their choice on Peertube.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Well, how reliable is peertube? Say I would do a ShowHN, that gets traction and a HN hug of death. In theory peertube could take the load for the videos without having to rely on youtube - but has anyone done this succesful in reality?
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    They talk about stress-testing of livestreaming towards the end of the article. A quick search shows that they've done several of them for videos as well. The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      "The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand." In theory, for sure. But in reality the p2p part might not work for lots of users for various reasons (firewall etc.) so then the server gets all the load and chokes. At least that has be my experience when experimenting with webRTC. "Last year, thanks to French indie journalist David Dufresne’s Au Poste ! livestream show and his hoster Octopuce, we got a livestream stress test with more than 400 simultaneous viewers " And 400 is not a very big number, if one has ambitious goals. But it is a good start.
      - amomo 3y ago
        Indeed it's not a big number, but you don't need to have a lot of viewers to be in the top 1% of twitch : https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001 https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001 So, what if peertube was a good answer to 99% cases ?
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        Oh, then those people should certainly use peertube. But then personally I would like to have a safe fallback, but this creates overhead.
        glenstein 3y ago
        Moreover, could we zoom out and ask what's at stake with this kind of question? What does a road map from Peertube in its present day towards twitch or YouTube level adoption look like, how long would that take? I ask because that's the kind of runway where there's time to continue to work out questions like this, and they aren't at present make or break, and so far as I can tell there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the technical challenges they've already solved.
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        "there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the technical challenges they've already solved." Certainly. I am 100% certain that the whole concept is doable.
- joelthelion 3y ago
  Framasoft February sounds like a great idea! I would definitely ask my favorite content providers to participate.
  - glenstein 3y ago
    Well my thinking is that you can hardly think of an easier, lower-stakes ask than asking creators to voluntarily agree that something from their back catalog gets hosted and a new place. And it allows old content to do new work, breathing life into a new platform.
sschueller 3y ago
A bit of topic. I created a peertube client[1] for android a few years ago. I love peertube and I really believe in the project however the effort I have put into the client and the rewrite which I almost finished using jetpack/mvvm structure just doesn't seem to be worth it. I feel bad for abandoning it but I think I may have too. [1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
- errhead 3y ago
  Sad to hear, but totally understandable. I'm sure the official app will need lots of contributors when it comes out next year.
  - sschueller 3y ago
    Is there an official app in the works? I wasn't aware. Do you have a link?
    - errhead 3y ago
      https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/ https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/ >Framasoft also announced that next year they will bet big on PeerTube, working on features such as better moderation tools, working on promoting the ecosystem more, and an official PeerTube mobile app. And on another front of the mobile battle, podcasting 2.0 apps are increasingly supporting PeerTube video via the RSS feed.
    - p4bl0 3y ago
      It was announced a few days ago at the Capitole du Libre festival in Toulouse, France. Framasoft is hiring a second developer to work on PeerTube (for now it is mostly the work of a single individual), and they will, among other numerous things, work on mobile apps and video/sound decoupling to allow for the podcast usage cited in another comment, for example.
- vfclists 3y ago
  You haven't explained why its not worth it. Is it because there is no interest in Peertube, or because there is no demand for an Android version? It looks like a chicken and egg situation. Is it an Android or IOS app for Peertube that will make Peertube popular, or is it Peertube popularity that will create demand for an Android app? I think it is more the former than the latter. I can't judge your motives for abandoning it, but I think you should persist and go that last mile which is usually the hardest of all.
Nextgrid 3y ago
Still has the same problem as all these alternative social media networks and why they're not taking off: on one hand you've got YouTube/etc which works and has appealing content front-and-centre, and on the other you have technobabble like "federation" and "instances" while the actual content (if there is even any!) is relegated into some dark corner. YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it. The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"? These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com and immediately start watching.
- mnd999 3y ago
  Last time I looked at peertube it had worse problems than that. The content was mostly neo-nazis and conspiracy theories, incels and other stuff that wasn’t on YouTube because it would get banned. I’m not interested in that. Has it got any better?
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    Really depends on which servers you follow.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Wah, there is no Incel content on YouTube? What about Pearl Davis, or the flood of shorts extracted from this podcast I just cant remember right now? Personally, I much prefer a uncensored platform over arbitrary censorship by big tech. Without censorship, I can at least decide for myself if I want to watch it. In fact, I find it quite concerning that people like you seem to actively advocate for voluntary censorship.
Aachen 3y ago
Peertube is something I've been meaning to use, so I'm interested but don't know much about it. The post says they dropped webtorrent in favor of HLS. Does this mean Peertube is no longer peer-to-peer? HLS is a codec or container format or something, whereas webtorrent sounds like a method to have peers stream video data to each other such that the server doesn't easily bog down under traffic spikes. That seemed like a fundamental advantage of Peertube over other platforms and I thought that's why the name was chosen. Am I misreading it or has this truly been dropped now? The post says HLS is also a brick in peer-to-peer streaming but.. it's not? I've used it, it's a container format that encapsulates video data, something like MP4 or MKV, not something that sets up peering sessions. HLS data would rather be something that webtorrent could be gossiping, if webtorrent weren't removed.
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  This is very confusing to me too. WebTorrents are just torrents over WebRTC Data stream, I guess by "P2P HLS" they mean sending HLS over either WebRTC Data or Video stream?
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    But if you stream from the server, it still would still not be p2p. SO either they implemented their own custom p2p solution, where the peers stream HLS to other peers, or they abandoned p2p. edit: the main FAQ on the website still clearly says, it is p2p. But now I am curious if they really implemented their own p2p solution, or if this is outdated. https://joinpeertube.org/en_US#what-are-the-main-advantages-of-peertube https://joinpeertube.org/en_US#what-are-the-main-advantages-...
    - jelv 3y ago
      "WebTorrent is a wonderful library that allowed PeerTube to be created five years ago. But due to many limitations of the library we decided to implement and default to another P2P protocol used in coordination with HLS. This new HLS player works very well, and does not have all the limitations of the WebTorrent player. It also allowed us to implement live streaming in PeerTube." https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465
rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
This instance has been upgraded to 6.0.0-rc.2 if you want to give it a try: https://framatube.org/videos/local https://framatube.org/videos/local (see About: https://framatube.org/about/instance https://framatube.org/about/instance) Couldn't find one with stable v6.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  Oh I love that RSS is not an obscure feature like in YT.
sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
Is it possible to see someone hosting this, as an example?
- sschueller 3y ago
  My test server you can reach at https://troll.tv/ https://troll.tv/ . It has very limited federation as I need the content to pass the play store when I release an update to the android client.
  - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
    I'm listened briefly to some hard heavy metal. Where is this physically hosted?
    - sschueller 3y ago
      Switzerland, exoscale
- jelv 3y ago
  Here is the curated list from Frama: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances that is used for the serach engine: https://sepiasearch.org/ https://sepiasearch.org/
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  Yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444608
- moreati 3y ago
  https://diode.zone https://diode.zone has been running many years. It was the first peertube instance I came across. Edit: https://tilvids.com/ https://tilvids.com/ is another
Avamander 3y ago
Removal of WebTorrent is sad, as it's still WIP in actual torrent clients (but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault). So it was removed before it got a chance in an ecosystem that moves slow. It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs. https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be reuploads, old versions should be separate. As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and duplicated.
- booteille 3y ago
  Hi! Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement Live Streaming with it (available since v3).
- jessehattabaugh 3y ago
  Perhaps a fork is in order!?
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  > but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about data streams. Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this is what webtorrent-desktop uses). I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.
Almondsetat 3y ago
I still cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate HN users can't seem to understand the purpose of PeerTube. Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website. Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings? Same Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the video material? Same. Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter. And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
- proactivesvcs 3y ago
  Relatedly, Mastodon is a) too hard for me to sign up for and b) a failed experiment. That the former was being repeated by people here still makes me chuckle.
  - dvngnt_ 3y ago
    https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up here you go
- Klonoar 3y ago
  > but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs? If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P > We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
  - georgyo 3y ago
    I did some testing of peertube a little over a year ago, and in practice you never used the webtorrent stuff anyway. The webtorrent always had a static http seed which is how videos played fast, but that web seed was usually more than capable of serving all the traffic. More so, it _must_ be capable of doing so because not all your clients will be able to support webtorrent effectively. In order to use a webtorrent, you needed someone else to be watching the same exact video as you at the same time, talk to the tracker, create a p2p connection, negotiate chunks and hope the other side has those chunks. This just never happened. Even when I tried to force ideal scenarios it was just too slow to be usable. I did some similar experiments with IPFS and results where much better but got worse every time I revisited the tests in the months after. Then protocol-labs completely scrapped all the libraries I was using and it doesn't work at all. At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually want to use it.
tetris11 3y ago
Does it plan to use yggdrasil[0] on ipv6 side of things, or is that not even relevant? 0: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
- rigelk 3y ago
  Yggdrasil in the browser? Come on.
sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
OT and speaking of decentralization. Does anyone understand why exactly we don't have a _decentralized search_ for torrents?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  Torrent clients that provide search then lose the legal plausible deniability that they are not specifically creating software for breaking the law. Besides torrent search websites and big uploaders make a lot of money from ads. Difficult to include ads in apps.
  - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
    > Difficult to include ads in apps. lol what?
    - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      Let me restate. Difficult to include ads in apps, when multiple excellent open-source torrent clients exist.
xd1936 3y ago
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube Sad to see WebTorrent support go. I'm a big believer in the idea of Torrent over WebRTC, and PeerTube seemed like a great use of the technology. It really solves the "this video is going viral and I'm being hugged to death" problem. I haven't heard much about P2P HLS... Hope to hear more.
hardcopy 3y ago
I recommend giving this recent video a watch on PeerTube/Mastodon if you're interested! https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs
cousin_it 3y ago
I love the idea of this project. But unfortunately there are economic reasons that make PeerTube unlikely to win. It's not even about the cost of video hosting, it would apply even if hosting was free. Imagine yourself as a popular creator. You can put up your videos on an ad-free platform where users can watch them without distractions and be happy. Or you can put them on an ad-supported platform and get a cut of the sweet ad money. As your videos become more popular, the temptation to go for (2) will become stronger. So the free platform will experience a drain of the most popular content, and viewers will flock away accordingly too. The same argument applies more generally to free vs commercial platforms. It's basically the reason why the internet sucks so much today. If there's a way to square this circle, I don't know it.
- seydor 3y ago
  It doesn't have to be ad-free, just someone has to have a nice interface and set up the advertisement/payments platform. There s clearly a market for advertising outside google: all those companies that sponsor videos. In fact it seems youtubers make more money from that than they make from google So someone has to make the effort.
- rakoo 3y ago
  You can't seriously put out your 1-minute theory that goes against more than ample evidence to say this is going to happen to peertube. The premise itself is wrong: the conditions of "winning" are not the same, to the point that it's not even useful to use that word. The metric of success for Peertube, and Framasoft, is how free the society and its communities are. Seeing the trend of the fediverse and of Libre softwares being used more and more tells me they are on a very good trajectory.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  To combat your pessimism - I would point to podcasts. In general, these were distributed on free platforms. The content became profitable through sponsorships. That is, the content creator does a deal directly with a brand to include a spot within the content read out by the presenter. So, there is a clear and well-trodden path to monetization for content creators even on free distribution platforms. Of course, as anyone who watches enough YouTube knows content creators double-dip on commercial platforms by including sponsorships and getting a cut of AdSense - so there is still a major advantage to also publishing on YouTube. But for the sponsorship, the value of the deal is related to overall reach across all platforms. That might give incentive for creators to release on multiple platforms, as long as the main commercial platform doesn't enforce exclusivity.
seydor 3y ago
bittorrent is not a CPU hog. But peer-to-peer WebRTC video is a major hog that makes it a pain to share video with more than ~7 people. Is this also true for peertube?
simbolit 3y ago
IIRC from about 2005-2010 there were intense experiments as to using torrents for video streaming. But, again iirc, the results were that there was too much competition for the earlier blocks. This was because unlike conventional file sharing, streaming is linear and people abandon videos halfway. Ultimately the savings over conventional hosted streaming were small. And so Blizzard and Nine Inch Nails used it, but the video players didn't. Do I misremember something, or has something substantially changed since then?
agumonkey 3y ago
It's now a long term, well paced project. I kinda admire these :) kudos
Dwedit 3y ago
For some reason, the page's html header identifies the page as language "fr-FR", so Firefox helpfully offered to translate this page into English.
entrepy123 3y ago
How do people rate the ease of installing and administrating PeerTube? Is there a way to install PeerTube that is as easy as MediaCMS [0, 1] installation [2]? I ask because I evaluated options for self-hosted video (basically YouTube replacements). PeerTube is more mature/popular than MediaCMS by far, by the looks of it. However, I really wanted "easy" and ended up landing with MediaCMS for now. I somewhat wonder about the project's potential longevity, but set that concern aside for lack of "better" options. If PeerTube can be spun up (single server will do) just as easily, I'd love to learn if it's possible/done. I know this is a tech site, but I do not want to spend time administering and configuring stuff a lot that is outside the scope of my main activities. I want it to just work as much as possible, but self-hosted (bare metal okay). I get that PeerTube is maybe much more, but any thoughts on taming (perceived or actual?) complexity related to hosting PeerTube would be most welcome. Thanks for any thoughts along these lines. [0] https://mediacms.io [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507204 [2] https://github.com/mediacms-io/mediacms/blob/main/docs/admins_docs.md#2-server-installation
- stefandesu 3y ago
  I was easily able to set up a PeerTube instance for mostly internal use among my friends with Docker. I don't remember how long it took, but I don't think I've encountered many issues. Adding login via our existing LDAP server was super easy, too.
calamari4065 3y ago
I run my own peertube instance like I run my own mastodon instance. Mastodon is cool, your private instance can just link up to any other instance and get all the data. If you search for something, your instance will proxy the search back to the originating server. The experience is only trivially more annoying than just using one of the big servers. Peertube is not like that. Notionally it supports all the same features, but when all the details come together, it just doesn't work. Say you have a private instance and you just want to browse videos. How do you find remote content? You can have your server 'follow' another, duplicating its timeline into yours... If the remote server allows it. As a user, you can simply follow any channel anywhere and it will populate into your server's local timeline. But what about search? You have to use a third party search index, and it's opt-in. Or you can go to each remote instance you know of and search there directly. Assuming you have a bunch of content coming into your server somehow, how do you find something to watch? You don't! Most of the filtering and searching is useless. Your individual user subscription feed is the only thing even remotely reliable. As much as I want to love PeerTube, I really, really hate it. Discoverability is so bad that the whole platform is nearly unusable. Realistically I'm sure that the best results you can get is just from signing up to the largest instance you can find. Which really defeats the entire point of it being distributed and federated. It really doesn't matter how many videos exist on the service if no one can find them. PeerTube is going to have to put some serious effort into this problem or they're going to fade into irrelevancy in a few years.

397 points by p4bl0 3y ago

Truly inspiring work from Framasoft! I just hope for more adoption. I don't know if anyone remembers the days of Firefox 2 and 3 and the days of "community marketing" but I think something like that could be a worthwhile project here. I would love, for instance, if significant creators could do a Framasoft February each year where they commit to hosting some portion of videos of their choice on Peertube.

hutzlibu 3y ago
Well, how reliable is peertube? Say I would do a ShowHN, that gets traction and a HN hug of death. In theory peertube could take the load for the videos without having to rely on youtube - but has anyone done this succesful in reality?
- j_maffe 3y ago
  They talk about stress-testing of livestreaming towards the end of the article. A quick search shows that they've done several of them for videos as well. The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand." In theory, for sure. But in reality the p2p part might not work for lots of users for various reasons (firewall etc.) so then the server gets all the load and chokes. At least that has be my experience when experimenting with webRTC. "Last year, thanks to French indie journalist David Dufresne’s Au Poste ! livestream show and his hoster Octopuce, we got a livestream stress test with more than 400 simultaneous viewers " And 400 is not a very big number, if one has ambitious goals. But it is a good start.
    - amomo 3y ago
      Indeed it's not a big number, but you don't need to have a lot of viewers to be in the top 1% of twitch : https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001 https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001 So, what if peertube was a good answer to 99% cases ?
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        Oh, then those people should certainly use peertube. But then personally I would like to have a safe fallback, but this creates overhead.
      - glenstein 3y ago
        Moreover, could we zoom out and ask what's at stake with this kind of question? What does a road map from Peertube in its present day towards twitch or YouTube level adoption look like, how long would that take? I ask because that's the kind of runway where there's time to continue to work out questions like this, and they aren't at present make or break, and so far as I can tell there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the technical challenges they've already solved.
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        "there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the technical challenges they've already solved." Certainly. I am 100% certain that the whole concept is doable.
joelthelion 3y ago
Framasoft February sounds like a great idea! I would definitely ask my favorite content providers to participate.
- glenstein 3y ago
  Well my thinking is that you can hardly think of an easier, lower-stakes ask than asking creators to voluntarily agree that something from their back catalog gets hosted and a new place. And it allows old content to do new work, breathing life into a new platform.

sschueller 3y ago

A bit of topic. I created a peertube client[1] for android a few years ago. I love peertube and I really believe in the project however the effort I have put into the client and the rewrite which I almost finished using jetpack/mvvm structure just doesn't seem to be worth it. I feel bad for abandoning it but I think I may have too. [1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android

errhead 3y ago
Sad to hear, but totally understandable. I'm sure the official app will need lots of contributors when it comes out next year.
- sschueller 3y ago
  Is there an official app in the works? I wasn't aware. Do you have a link?
  - errhead 3y ago
    https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/ https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/ >Framasoft also announced that next year they will bet big on PeerTube, working on features such as better moderation tools, working on promoting the ecosystem more, and an official PeerTube mobile app. And on another front of the mobile battle, podcasting 2.0 apps are increasingly supporting PeerTube video via the RSS feed.
  - p4bl0 3y ago
    It was announced a few days ago at the Capitole du Libre festival in Toulouse, France. Framasoft is hiring a second developer to work on PeerTube (for now it is mostly the work of a single individual), and they will, among other numerous things, work on mobile apps and video/sound decoupling to allow for the podcast usage cited in another comment, for example.
vfclists 3y ago
You haven't explained why its not worth it. Is it because there is no interest in Peertube, or because there is no demand for an Android version? It looks like a chicken and egg situation. Is it an Android or IOS app for Peertube that will make Peertube popular, or is it Peertube popularity that will create demand for an Android app? I think it is more the former than the latter. I can't judge your motives for abandoning it, but I think you should persist and go that last mile which is usually the hardest of all.

Nextgrid 3y ago

Still has the same problem as all these alternative social media networks and why they're not taking off: on one hand you've got YouTube/etc which works and has appealing content front-and-centre, and on the other you have technobabble like "federation" and "instances" while the actual content (if there is even any!) is relegated into some dark corner. YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it. The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"? These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com and immediately start watching.

mnd999 3y ago
Last time I looked at peertube it had worse problems than that. The content was mostly neo-nazis and conspiracy theories, incels and other stuff that wasn’t on YouTube because it would get banned. I’m not interested in that. Has it got any better?
- j_maffe 3y ago
  Really depends on which servers you follow.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lynx23 3y ago
  Wah, there is no Incel content on YouTube? What about Pearl Davis, or the flood of shorts extracted from this podcast I just cant remember right now? Personally, I much prefer a uncensored platform over arbitrary censorship by big tech. Without censorship, I can at least decide for myself if I want to watch it. In fact, I find it quite concerning that people like you seem to actively advocate for voluntary censorship.

Aachen 3y ago

Peertube is something I've been meaning to use, so I'm interested but don't know much about it. The post says they dropped webtorrent in favor of HLS. Does this mean Peertube is no longer peer-to-peer? HLS is a codec or container format or something, whereas webtorrent sounds like a method to have peers stream video data to each other such that the server doesn't easily bog down under traffic spikes. That seemed like a fundamental advantage of Peertube over other platforms and I thought that's why the name was chosen. Am I misreading it or has this truly been dropped now? The post says HLS is also a brick in peer-to-peer streaming but.. it's not? I've used it, it's a container format that encapsulates video data, something like MP4 or MKV, not something that sets up peering sessions. HLS data would rather be something that webtorrent could be gossiping, if webtorrent weren't removed.

pzmarzly 3y ago
This is very confusing to me too. WebTorrents are just torrents over WebRTC Data stream, I guess by "P2P HLS" they mean sending HLS over either WebRTC Data or Video stream?
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  But if you stream from the server, it still would still not be p2p. SO either they implemented their own custom p2p solution, where the peers stream HLS to other peers, or they abandoned p2p. edit: the main FAQ on the website still clearly says, it is p2p. But now I am curious if they really implemented their own p2p solution, or if this is outdated. https://joinpeertube.org/en_US#what-are-the-main-advantages-of-peertube https://joinpeertube.org/en_US#what-are-the-main-advantages-...
  - jelv 3y ago
    "WebTorrent is a wonderful library that allowed PeerTube to be created five years ago. But due to many limitations of the library we decided to implement and default to another P2P protocol used in coordination with HLS. This new HLS player works very well, and does not have all the limitations of the WebTorrent player. It also allowed us to implement live streaming in PeerTube." https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago

This instance has been upgraded to 6.0.0-rc.2 if you want to give it a try: https://framatube.org/videos/local https://framatube.org/videos/local (see About: https://framatube.org/about/instance https://framatube.org/about/instance) Couldn't find one with stable v6.

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
Oh I love that RSS is not an obscure feature like in YT.

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago

Is it possible to see someone hosting this, as an example?

sschueller 3y ago
My test server you can reach at https://troll.tv/ https://troll.tv/ . It has very limited federation as I need the content to pass the play store when I release an update to the android client.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  I'm listened briefly to some hard heavy metal. Where is this physically hosted?
  - sschueller 3y ago
    Switzerland, exoscale
jelv 3y ago
Here is the curated list from Frama: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances that is used for the serach engine: https://sepiasearch.org/ https://sepiasearch.org/
rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
Yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444608
moreati 3y ago
https://diode.zone https://diode.zone has been running many years. It was the first peertube instance I came across. Edit: https://tilvids.com/ https://tilvids.com/ is another

Avamander 3y ago

Removal of WebTorrent is sad, as it's still WIP in actual torrent clients (but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault). So it was removed before it got a chance in an ecosystem that moves slow. It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs. https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be reuploads, old versions should be separate. As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and duplicated.

booteille 3y ago
Hi! Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement Live Streaming with it (available since v3).
jessehattabaugh 3y ago
Perhaps a fork is in order!?
pzmarzly 3y ago
> but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about data streams. Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this is what webtorrent-desktop uses). I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.

Almondsetat 3y ago

I still cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate HN users can't seem to understand the purpose of PeerTube. Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website. Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings? Same Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the video material? Same. Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter. And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?

proactivesvcs 3y ago
Relatedly, Mastodon is a) too hard for me to sign up for and b) a failed experiment. That the former was being repeated by people here still makes me chuckle.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up here you go
Klonoar 3y ago
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs? If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P > We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
- georgyo 3y ago
  I did some testing of peertube a little over a year ago, and in practice you never used the webtorrent stuff anyway. The webtorrent always had a static http seed which is how videos played fast, but that web seed was usually more than capable of serving all the traffic. More so, it _must_ be capable of doing so because not all your clients will be able to support webtorrent effectively. In order to use a webtorrent, you needed someone else to be watching the same exact video as you at the same time, talk to the tracker, create a p2p connection, negotiate chunks and hope the other side has those chunks. This just never happened. Even when I tried to force ideal scenarios it was just too slow to be usable. I did some similar experiments with IPFS and results where much better but got worse every time I revisited the tests in the months after. Then protocol-labs completely scrapped all the libraries I was using and it doesn't work at all. At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually want to use it.

tetris11 3y ago

Does it plan to use yggdrasil[0] on ipv6 side of things, or is that not even relevant? 0: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

rigelk 3y ago
Yggdrasil in the browser? Come on.

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago

OT and speaking of decentralization. Does anyone understand why exactly we don't have a _decentralized search_ for torrents?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Torrent clients that provide search then lose the legal plausible deniability that they are not specifically creating software for breaking the law. Besides torrent search websites and big uploaders make a lot of money from ads. Difficult to include ads in apps.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  > Difficult to include ads in apps. lol what?
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    Let me restate. Difficult to include ads in apps, when multiple excellent open-source torrent clients exist.

xd1936 3y ago

> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube Sad to see WebTorrent support go. I'm a big believer in the idea of Torrent over WebRTC, and PeerTube seemed like a great use of the technology. It really solves the "this video is going viral and I'm being hugged to death" problem. I haven't heard much about P2P HLS... Hope to hear more.

hardcopy 3y ago

I recommend giving this recent video a watch on PeerTube/Mastodon if you're interested! https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs

cousin_it 3y ago

I love the idea of this project. But unfortunately there are economic reasons that make PeerTube unlikely to win. It's not even about the cost of video hosting, it would apply even if hosting was free. Imagine yourself as a popular creator. You can put up your videos on an ad-free platform where users can watch them without distractions and be happy. Or you can put them on an ad-supported platform and get a cut of the sweet ad money. As your videos become more popular, the temptation to go for (2) will become stronger. So the free platform will experience a drain of the most popular content, and viewers will flock away accordingly too. The same argument applies more generally to free vs commercial platforms. It's basically the reason why the internet sucks so much today. If there's a way to square this circle, I don't know it.

seydor 3y ago
It doesn't have to be ad-free, just someone has to have a nice interface and set up the advertisement/payments platform. There s clearly a market for advertising outside google: all those companies that sponsor videos. In fact it seems youtubers make more money from that than they make from google So someone has to make the effort.
rakoo 3y ago
You can't seriously put out your 1-minute theory that goes against more than ample evidence to say this is going to happen to peertube. The premise itself is wrong: the conditions of "winning" are not the same, to the point that it's not even useful to use that word. The metric of success for Peertube, and Framasoft, is how free the society and its communities are. Seeing the trend of the fediverse and of Libre softwares being used more and more tells me they are on a very good trajectory.
zoogeny 3y ago
To combat your pessimism - I would point to podcasts. In general, these were distributed on free platforms. The content became profitable through sponsorships. That is, the content creator does a deal directly with a brand to include a spot within the content read out by the presenter. So, there is a clear and well-trodden path to monetization for content creators even on free distribution platforms. Of course, as anyone who watches enough YouTube knows content creators double-dip on commercial platforms by including sponsorships and getting a cut of AdSense - so there is still a major advantage to also publishing on YouTube. But for the sponsorship, the value of the deal is related to overall reach across all platforms. That might give incentive for creators to release on multiple platforms, as long as the main commercial platform doesn't enforce exclusivity.

seydor 3y ago

bittorrent is not a CPU hog. But peer-to-peer WebRTC video is a major hog that makes it a pain to share video with more than ~7 people. Is this also true for peertube?

simbolit 3y ago

IIRC from about 2005-2010 there were intense experiments as to using torrents for video streaming. But, again iirc, the results were that there was too much competition for the earlier blocks. This was because unlike conventional file sharing, streaming is linear and people abandon videos halfway. Ultimately the savings over conventional hosted streaming were small. And so Blizzard and Nine Inch Nails used it, but the video players didn't. Do I misremember something, or has something substantially changed since then?

agumonkey 3y ago

It's now a long term, well paced project. I kinda admire these :) kudos

Dwedit 3y ago

For some reason, the page's html header identifies the page as language "fr-FR", so Firefox helpfully offered to translate this page into English.

entrepy123 3y ago

How do people rate the ease of installing and administrating PeerTube? Is there a way to install PeerTube that is as easy as MediaCMS [0, 1] installation [2]? I ask because I evaluated options for self-hosted video (basically YouTube replacements). PeerTube is more mature/popular than MediaCMS by far, by the looks of it. However, I really wanted "easy" and ended up landing with MediaCMS for now. I somewhat wonder about the project's potential longevity, but set that concern aside for lack of "better" options. If PeerTube can be spun up (single server will do) just as easily, I'd love to learn if it's possible/done. I know this is a tech site, but I do not want to spend time administering and configuring stuff a lot that is outside the scope of my main activities. I want it to just work as much as possible, but self-hosted (bare metal okay). I get that PeerTube is maybe much more, but any thoughts on taming (perceived or actual?) complexity related to hosting PeerTube would be most welcome. Thanks for any thoughts along these lines. [0] https://mediacms.io [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507204 [2] https://github.com/mediacms-io/mediacms/blob/main/docs/admins_docs.md#2-server-installation

stefandesu 3y ago
I was easily able to set up a PeerTube instance for mostly internal use among my friends with Docker. I don't remember how long it took, but I don't think I've encountered many issues. Adding login via our existing LDAP server was super easy, too.

calamari4065 3y ago

I run my own peertube instance like I run my own mastodon instance. Mastodon is cool, your private instance can just link up to any other instance and get all the data. If you search for something, your instance will proxy the search back to the originating server. The experience is only trivially more annoying than just using one of the big servers. Peertube is not like that. Notionally it supports all the same features, but when all the details come together, it just doesn't work. Say you have a private instance and you just want to browse videos. How do you find remote content? You can have your server 'follow' another, duplicating its timeline into yours... If the remote server allows it. As a user, you can simply follow any channel anywhere and it will populate into your server's local timeline. But what about search? You have to use a third party search index, and it's opt-in. Or you can go to each remote instance you know of and search there directly. Assuming you have a bunch of content coming into your server somehow, how do you find something to watch? You don't! Most of the filtering and searching is useless. Your individual user subscription feed is the only thing even remotely reliable. As much as I want to love PeerTube, I really, really hate it. Discoverability is so bad that the whole platform is nearly unusable. Realistically I'm sure that the best results you can get is just from signing up to the largest instance you can find. Which really defeats the entire point of it being distributed and federated. It really doesn't matter how many videos exist on the service if no one can find them. PeerTube is going to have to put some serious effort into this problem or they're going to fade into irrelevancy in a few years.