[HN Gopher] PeerTube 4 RC
___________________________________________________________________
PeerTube 4 RC
Author : booteille
Score : 246 points
Date : 2021-11-30 09:07 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (framablog.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (framablog.org)
| yuri91 wrote:
| I like the idea of PeerTube, but I have a question:
|
| How well does the p2p offloading of viral videos work in
| practice?
|
| How is the average user experience? Do you get a lot of buffering
| pauses, or is it seamless as if it was Youtube? Assuming a
| medium-sized server hosting the content.
| booteille wrote:
| Actually, the experience is really fluid for most people. There
| can be some edgecases where we have users reporting huge
| bufferings but that's rare and hard to diagnostic since often
| bound to the client.
|
| Before the V3, we tried the live with more than 150people
| watching at the same time with some friends. 1/5 of the
| bandwidth was served by the server, P2P handled the rest.
|
| Since then, things continued to improve and the goal of
| Framasoft (from which I am external, so ask directly to
| Framasoft if you have specific question) is to provide the most
| stable experience with PeerTube.
|
| You can find out our feedback (in french, though), on Framasoft
| forums: https://framacolibri.org/t/fonctionnalite-live-retour-
| dutili...
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| My experience to date has been the buffering I experience while
| watching a video kills the experience.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| The most concurrent views I've seen on my server was about
| forty one, including myself. It was seamless, however the video
| was only around 280 megabytes and there was only one quality
| setting for it. I don't imagine it being the case for HD videos
| where users are viewing in disparate qualities.
| olah_1 wrote:
| The elephant in the room is that videos take a long time to
| create. And thus hosting of the videos won't easily be trusted to
| random server admins.
|
| I barely trust pleroma/mastodon admins with my garbage little
| text posts. I wouldn't want to put my hard work on a server with
| no guarantee of how long they'll be there or if one of them will
| be deleted and maybe I won't even realize it.
|
| Yes, youtube sometimes deletes channels or videos. That isn't
| perfect either. But somehow Peertube feels even worse because the
| entire fediverse is run by a bunch of "some guys" that are
| accountable to no one.
| robobro wrote:
| if you can trust yourself, host your own. that's the point
| olah_1 wrote:
| That limits the userbase to only people that are savvy enough
| to be a server admin, though. I've actually been discouraged
| from running my own server by people in the Matrix Chat
| world. Apparently there are risks if you're not knowledgable
| enough.
| shkkmo wrote:
| It seems to me that a federated system like PeerTube would give
| you more control over which admins you are beholden since you
| can choose where to publish. You could even setup your own host
| if you don't trust any of them
|
| Also, can't you post your videos to other platforms and/or keep
| your own backups? If the host deletes your video, can't you
| just republish it on a different one?
| webscout wrote:
| If this is the current pinnacle of the decentralised Web, I don't
| expect to see a YT competitor in my lifetime.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I don't think it's the pinnacle, no. I think the fediverse has
| been a stopgap. Not trying to minimize the hard work of these
| developers, but the user experience just doesn't make sense.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Please show your solution so we can follow it verbatim
| timbit42 wrote:
| How is this similar or different from LBRY / Odysee?
| orblivion wrote:
| I don't think there's a blockchain or currency involved with
| Peertube. It's more like Mastodon for videos. In fact, you can
| follow Peertube accounts and comment on Peertube videos using
| your Mastodon account.
| zibzab wrote:
| Have you noticed YouTube heavily throttling unofficial clients
| lately?
|
| Maybe we really need a video delivery service that doesn't break
| every other day to please beancounters at Google.
| meibo wrote:
| Yes, if you don't provide a correct token that is calculated in
| heavily obfuscated javascript, the CDN will throttle you to
| kilobyte/s levels, basically making it impossible to watch
| anything real-time.
|
| The common way to deal with this seems to be to "emulate" the
| function calls on the input data, which seem to be randomized.
| contravariant wrote:
| If you mean youtube-dl then you might be better of migrating to
| yt-dlp. It doesn't look like youtube-dl is going to resolve
| those throttling issues any time soon.
| zibzab wrote:
| Nope, Google is actively targeting different tools, yt-dlp
| included.
|
| It's a game of whack-a-mole right now.
| [deleted]
| ollybee wrote:
| Yes, I have a browser plugin to open youtube links in mpv, but
| it's been unusable recently with constant buffering. I dont
| even fetch them at best quality.
| markvdb wrote:
| pip install yt-dlp
|
| In ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf, add the following line, preferably
| near the top:
|
| script-opts-add=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp
|
| That should hopefully solve your issue.
| mssdvd wrote:
| You don't need to update the config if you have the latest
| version of mpv (0.34) released one month ago.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| Are you using yt-dlp with mpv?
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| Even the official client has been buffering heavily on iOS
| for the last two days. No idea what's going on, but I'm
| getting RealPlayer flashbacks.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Oh goodie, I am not the only one. I ran into this issue
| last night and YouTube app in my iPad is buffering heavily
| and stuck in 480p. My usual solution for this is to restart
| the iPad. Yup, have to restart the iPad because swipe-to-
| close didn't help.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| It took me a long time to find it, but this is "the" search
| engine for PeerTube:
|
| https://sepiasearch.org/
|
| This could be a reasonable entry point for a non-technical user
| who just wants to watch videos. If you layer in recommendations
| system, trending etc. and have a default "Instance" for users to
| join, Peertube could start to compete with the user experience of
| YouTube
| betwixthewires wrote:
| These recommendations you're laying out to help compete with
| YouTube are antithetical to the whole purpose of peertube.
|
| First, a default instance is definitely a bad idea if you're
| trying to build a decentralized network of tube site servers,
| and it increases cost on a central entity in the network
| (probably framasoft who would be hosting the "default" server).
| _The whole idea is for there not to be a central server._
|
| Recommendations and trending are architecturally untenable as
| well as antithetical. When you're collecting whatever criteria
| makes a video "good" from disparate servers across the web you
| introduce a ton of bandwidth and other issues. And why would
| anyone want some algorithm deciding for them what they feel
| like watching? Beyond that, something like this is hard to get
| right, you're more likely to get it wrong and wind up with
| pissed off users.
| zibzab wrote:
| PSA:
|
| If your are de-googled and use NewPipe to watch YouTube, it
| already supports PeerTube (and more).
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
| sschueller wrote:
| I made an android client specifically for peertube also open
| source: https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
|
| Any help with development is very welcome as I have little time
| to invest at the moment.
| jerheinze wrote:
| NewPipe is such a nice piece of FOSS. Too bad that they decided
| against integrating SponsorBlock.
| Bayart wrote:
| I'm really glad YT Vanced did integrate it.
| k__ wrote:
| What's the difference between Vanced and NewPipe?
| rakoo wrote:
| Newpipe is Libre Software, Vanced is not
| Bayart wrote:
| Vanced is a mod of the stock YT app, NewPipe is a
| completely new codebase that doesn't use YT's API.
| lol768 wrote:
| Yeah, just read through the GitHub issues thread and it's
| rather flimsy justification for not implementing it that
| seems to boil down to "because I don't want to". A real
| shame, since I'd always admired the project.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| "Because I don't want to" is a perfectly valid reason to
| not implement something in free software.
| glidergun wrote:
| This fork integrates sponsorblock, been using it for a while
| and even though the maintainer calls the integration "rather
| basic" it works quite well.
| https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
| markvdb wrote:
| The PeerTube developer community is super friendly and helpful to
| new developers. I contributed some minor improvements around a
| year ago, minimally touching several sides of the projects:
|
| - documentation for the SAML plugin
|
| - translation to my native language
|
| - some improvements to enable better encoding performance through
| hardware encoding
|
| My experience with the maintainers was nothing but positive, in
| all three areas. Such a warm welcome is rare in development land,
| so I commend the PeerTube maintainers not only for their
| excellent software, but also for their welcoming attitude.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| That's nice to hear, sometimes my bugreports to open source
| projects was threatened like enemy attacks.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| this is super nice. i have submitted patches to the project out
| of curiosity and they were accepted. A nice community on github.
| I would suggest people here to try using the website ,
| tilvids.com is a perfect example. i was doing its beta testing of
| the livestreaming and i found 30 seconds delay between screen
| recording and viewing on a client. That was some random russian
| server so the latency was bad anyways because of location but
| still.
|
| Tldr; tilvids.com
| pezzana wrote:
| An alternative to centralized video sharing is definitely needed
| and PeerTube looks interesting.
|
| Discoverability is one of the things that makes YouTube so
| compelling. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like PeerTube offers
| much on this front at the moment.
|
| There's a search app:
|
| https://sepiasearch.org/
|
| But there's nothing like the recommendations or related video
| feature of YouTube. How hard would that be to add given
| PeerTube's architecture?
|
| edit: I just discovered that that GitHub page does a much better
| job than the landing page of explaining PeerTube. In particular,
| it breaks down features from the perspective of users, creators,
| and admins. It even leads with an introductory video (but not
| embedded for some reason).
|
| https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
| littlestymaar wrote:
| While I agree that recommendation are what made YouTube so
| popular, and also boosts engagement a lot, they are also the
| most controversial feature of YouTube because they tend to
| converge toward the most polarizing videos, conspiracy
| theories, etc. They've also been gamed in a few creepy ways[1]
|
| [1]: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-
| in...
| zo1 wrote:
| YouTube literally keeps showing me the same Playlist of
| videos every day, and absolutely refuses to let me get
| anything fresh until I behave like a good cow user and watch
| the videos they want me to so they can milk my eyeballs with
| ad views.
| fwip wrote:
| On the web client, it's easy to mark these videos as "Not
| Interested." I haven't noticed them showing up again after
| that.
| zo1 wrote:
| The problem is that it's the type of content that I
| generally want to watch. So if I mark it as not
| interested I'm assuming it'll generalize and not give me
| the same kind of content. Stuck between a rock and a hard
| place.
|
| The reason I would prefer not to mark as "not interested"
| is that there is so much content that is being produced
| by channels that I subscribe to that I never get
| recommended to me.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| PeerTube is still centralized to whatever federated instance
| you are using. Still waiting on a true decentralized solution.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| Check out the LBRY protocol and the LBRY desktop app or it's
| centralized frontend Odysee
| olah_1 wrote:
| LBRY desktop is also centralized btw. AFAIK there are no
| front ends built by totally different teams from LBRY,
| although there could be.
| mariusor wrote:
| I might be inferring the wrong thing from what you're saying,
| but I believe you're wrong.
|
| The same video that is uploaded on multiple instances can
| share peers, so when you're watching it, you get it in a
| decentralized fashion.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Also videos are regular webtorrents, they can be downloaded
| (or watched) without any support from the instance, as long
| as one peer is online. Less sure about video description
| and comments (though comments received by your instance
| should be displayed).
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I get excited whenever I see a new federated alternative of
| existing big players, like PeerTube ( vs Youtube ) or Mastadon (
| vs Twitter ) or Diaspora ( vs facebook ) but unfortunately I
| never get around to using them considering longevity of a
| single/multiple nodes in the system. I know it does not make
| sense but fear or losing/migrating preferences/data has kept me
| from using most of these services
| kzrdude wrote:
| What data is there to lose? I think it's best to just jump in
| and try, if you want to.
| quiffledwerg wrote:
| This project needs marketing people on the team.
|
| I'm interested in peertube it's an exciting concept. When I when
| to that page I expected a simple, clean design inviting me to
| download it or use it or whatever. Instead there's a rambling
| unfocused page without a call to action.
|
| YouTube is the Mike Tyson of video.... you've gotta be much
| better than this to get in the ring with YouTube.
| BjornW wrote:
| The url points to a blogpost at Framasoft with information on
| the release canidate. If you visit the homepage of Peertube
| (https://joinpeertube.org) you'll likely find the information
| you are looking for.
| aosaigh wrote:
| I think this is a good example of what separates HN users
| from normal users. The fact that the blog is on a completely
| different domain and using a different name is confusing.
| What's more, when you visit the Peertube domain it's not
| clear what you should do. Do I need to download something?
| What's an instance? How come the top video on the page brings
| me to a separate page?
|
| I know these are things that most HN users are happy to dig
| into and figure out, but currently there's no way Peertube is
| "an alternative to video platforms" for even saavy web users,
| let alone regular users. Maybe that's OK though?
| mshanu wrote:
| I think this is the challenge with all decentralised
| systems, its not as easy as you click some buttons and you
| get served like in web 2. Hope more focus will come on
| experience part of this, for such approaches to become
| popular
| Zababa wrote:
| The way peertube is an alternative to youtube is not by end
| users understanding what it is, but by technical users
| hosting themselves the videos. For example, OCaml has a
| peertube instance to watch OCaml related content:
| https://watch.ocaml.org/. This is an alternative to
| watching the content on youtube.
| laurentb wrote:
| not really, Framasoft is a French company that develops a
| collection of open source alternatives to popular software.
|
| It's the same as if Microsoft was posting a blog on its own
| msdn.com domain for something related to visual studio or
| SharePoint
| dewey wrote:
| > It's the same as if Microsoft was posting a blog on its
| own msdn.com domain for something related to visual
| studio or SharePoint
|
| Which underlines the point that the parent is making.
| Normal users are not the ones reading things related to
| SharePoint. Apple does their announcements on the
| apple.com domain and not on applnews.com.
|
| > I think this is a good example of what separates HN
| users from normal users.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Normal users are not the ones reading things related to
| SharePoint.
|
| Normal users would never ever find this blog post in the
| first place. You are trying to fix a problem that does
| not exist.
| dtonon wrote:
| The "Read the blog post" link is placed in the first
| highlighted box of the project's homepage :)
| detaro wrote:
| Normal users are also not the ones primarily expected to
| read release notes for release candidates for the
| Peertube server software. Sharepoint is arguably a good
| comparison: run by administrators for users - it's just
| that peertube is more interesting to nerds that are both
| in one (although I'm sure there's some folks with
| sharepoint at home...).
| igorkraw wrote:
| Small correction, it's a non-profit association that can
| be placed in the same cluster as Mozilla, the EFF, the
| CCC or the Linux Foundation (i.e., the good guys if you
| care about FOSS and an open software and internet world)
| cameronh90 wrote:
| > msdn.com
|
| Doesn't exist any more. It's now all under microsoft.com
| (e.g. devblogs.microsoft.com).
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| If you go to that site you don't get tons of videos, you get
| a technical explanation of what it is and a link to a page
| with 10 channels. Unless you're the kind of person who is on
| HN, you're just gonna go to youtube instead.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I was tempted to agree but considering they managed to make
| such a nice and large piece of software without marketing.. I'd
| keep the marketing low and let the energy flow organically.
| booteille wrote:
| The people behind PeerTube are the non-for-profit Framasoft.
|
| Actually, there is only one developer, not even working full
| time, on the project, and some lovely contributors.
|
| So Framasoft is actually not playing with same means than big
| players like YouTube or so. That's why they are not handling
| the problem the same way.
|
| The goal here is mainly to build a tool for people and small
| structures. There is no intent to be the new YouTube.
|
| The message is more humble: anyone should be able to host and
| share at low cost their own videos. That's the issue that
| PeerTube solves right now.
|
| If you think all of that sounds good, think about donating to
| Framasoft. They are living mostly from donations and that's
| what made PeerTube possible.
|
| https://framasoft.org/en/#support
| tonguez wrote:
| "The goal here is to build a tool for people" This tool is
| going to be unusable for 99.99% of people.
|
| "There is no intent to be the new YouTube." Good, no one
| likes YouTube. That's why people want an alternative.
|
| "There is only one developer" On this page it says Framasoft
| has "40 members, including 10 employees". Maybe they should
| fire some of those people and hire some more developers of
| Peertube? Quite frankly no one cares about any of the other
| 30 projects they are creating.
|
| Also from their page: "Framasoft is (and wishes to remain) a
| small not-for-profit association". Imagine if there was no
| covid vaccine yet, and Framasoft was developing a vaccine for
| covid, except they stated they could only ever manufacture 10
| vaccines a year, and had no plans on expanding their project.
| You are going to get a lot of angry people every single time
| you announce progress given the current context we are in.
| And every single time, someone is going to defend them
| saying, "They never intended to be a big project" or
| whatever. Then why would anyone care?
|
| It's like if you were in the middle of WW2 and there was a
| guy walking around saying he wants peace, and if you ask him
| what kind of peace he wants, he says peace between cats and
| dogs. How autistic would you have to be miss the context we
| are in?
| streamofdigits wrote:
| consider though that if peertube just emulates the practices of
| existing players the result will likely be exactly the same
|
| the high thresholds and lack of mainstream polish of most open
| source projects is a true fact and has to do with the economic
| / business models (or non-models) so its not an easy challenge
| to solve
|
| somehow being able to engage creative people to contribute
| (whether it is UI design, visual art, engaging text etc) will
| be critical for FOSS to have bigger impact
| presentation wrote:
| Agree, the way it's presented will pretty much guarantee nobody
| but hardcore nerds will ever use it, it's sad that noble
| efforts hobble themselves in this way.
|
| I mean isn't it ironic that PeerTube doesn't use a PeerTube
| video to introduce its new features? Guess their team thinks
| their own product isn't a good way of consuming interesting
| information...
| betwixthewires wrote:
| So the site is about a _server_ you can run that will be your
| very own tube site. _Who other than nerds is going to install
| that?_ It requires administration, you 're going to be very
| interested in running an instance to the point of commitment
| before you go there.
| qudat wrote:
| Great idea and totally agree. Even someone who has been de-
| googling for awhile cannot step away from YT and PeerTube
| just isn't the same thing at all.
| roenxi wrote:
| It'd certainly be nice (although an oxymoron) if Framasoft
| could singlehandedly create a deep decentralised network of
| video content creators to challenge YouTube. But that isn't
| really necessary - if all they do is bring down the cost of
| someone else to compete then that is more than enough to be
| helpful.
|
| And while I do agree that a savvy marketer would have had a
| video in the article ... a video is actually a bad medium for
| communicating a new release. Videos are better for stuff with
| a bit of visual spectacle.
| loceng wrote:
| Does the license allow commercial use without releasing any
| modifications? Else it doesn't make sense for a potential
| competitor to provide improvements to create additional
| competitors for themselves.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| PeerTube itself is licenced under the AGPL.
|
| But that wouldn't stop a non-AGPL licenced solution from
| interoperating as the network is based on an open
| standard (ActivityPub).
| rakoo wrote:
| I think you are still under the impression that success
| is still based on codebase and you just need the perfect
| source code to build the most successful service. That's
| wrong. Success is built on relentless labor, continuous
| marketing and luck. That's why Gitlab can build a
| successful company while dailymotion can fail to build
| what is functionally not new.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-30 23:01 UTC)