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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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]
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
- 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.
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/
Any help with development is very welcome as I have little time to invest at the moment.
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.
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
Dead Comment
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?
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…
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.
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
Maybe we really need a video delivery service that doesn't break every other day to please beancounters at Google.
It's a game of whack-a-mole right now.
The common way to deal with this seems to be to "emulate" the function calls on the input data, which seem to be randomized.
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.
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
[1]: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...