The release of the decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting PeerTube 3.0 is available. PeerTube offers a vendor-independent alternative to YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo, using a P2P content distribution network and linking visitors' browsers. The developments of the project are distributed under the AGPLv3 license.
A key innovation in PeerTube 3.0 is support for live streaming with P2P content delivery. Typical programs such as OBS can be used to manage to stream. The viewing delay relative to the source is from 30 to 60 seconds. Depending on the power of the equipment, PeerTube can provide processing on one server of hundreds of simultaneous views (it does not scale up to thousands yet, but they promise to fix it).
For server owners, streaming administration settings are provided. Two modes are supported - short-lived and permanent. The first allows replay by a unique identifier and saving the video, while the second allows only viewing the current state, like in Twitch.
Other changes in the new release:
- New styling of the side menu, notifications, moderation tools, and admin panel has been proposed.
- The horizontal account menu is divided into two parts. New sections "My Settings", "My Library" and "Administration" have been added to the menu to access content and user settings. The section "My library" contains channels, videos, imports, changes, playlists, subscriptions and browsing history. "My settings" offers account settings and tools for moderating and managing notifications. The section "My notifications" has been added to the block that appears when you click on the username.
- For the administrator, a new page for managing video comments has been implemented, which shows a summary with the latest comments and provides buttons for deleting all comments of a specific user or deleting typical comments by the mask.
- An option is provided in the admin interface to automatically block new videos.
- The moderator is given the opportunity to view all videos, including unpublished and private, for the specified channels and accounts.
- Added the ability to download GIF avatars.
- Provided the ability to retry a failed download. Added clearer boot error messages.
- Added the ability to specify the original URL for a video that is not local.
Recall that PeerTube is based on the use of a BitTorrent WebTorrent client, which runs in a browser and uses WebRTC technology to organize a direct P2P communication channel between browsers, and the ActivityPub protocol, which allows you to combine disparate video servers into a common federated network, in which visitors participate in delivery content and have the ability to subscribe to channels and receive notifications about new videos. The web interface provided by the project is built using the Angular framework.
The federated PeerTube network is formed as a community of interconnected small video hosting servers, each with its own administrator, and rules can be adopted. Each video server plays the role of a BitTorrent tracker, which hosts the user accounts of this server and their videos. User IDs are formed in the form "@ user_name @ server_domain". Browsing data is transmitted directly from the browsers of other visitors viewing the content.
If no one is watching the video, the upload is organized by the server to which the video was originally uploaded (using the WebSeed protocol ). In addition to distributing traffic among users watching videos, PeerTube also allows sites launched by authors for the initial placement of videos to cache videos of other authors, forming a distributed network not only from clients but also from servers, as well as providing fault tolerance.
To start broadcasting through PeerTube, the user just needs to upload a video, description, and a set of tags to one of the servers. This will make the video available across the entire federated network, not just from the primary download server. To work with PeerTube and participate in the distribution of content, a regular browser is enough and no additional software is required. Users can track the activity on selected video channels by subscribing to channels of interest on federated social networks (for example, Mastodon and Pleroma) or via RSS. To distribute video using P2P communications, the user can also add a special widget with a built-in web player to his site.
Currently, there are about 700 servers for hosting content, supported by various volunteers and organizations. If the user is not satisfied with the rules for posting videos on a specific PeerTube server, he can connect to another server or start his own server. For quick server deployment, a pre-configured Docker image (chocobozzz / peertube) is provided.
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