peertube/README.md

PeerTube

Federated (ActivityPub) video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser with WebTorrent.

PeerTube is sponsored by Framasoft, a non-profit that promotes, spreads and develops free culture in general, and free-libre software in particular. If you want to support this project, please consider donating to them.

Client

Server

Demonstration

Want to see it in action?

• Demonstration servers:
  • peertube.cpy.re
  • peertube2.cpy.re
  • peertube3.cpy.re
• Video to see what the "decentralization feature" looks like

Why

We can't build a FOSS video streaming alternatives to YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo... with a centralized software. One organization alone may not have enough money to pay for bandwidth and video storage of its servers.

So we need to have a decentralized network of servers seeding videos (as Diaspora for example). But it's not enough because one video could become famous and overload the server. It's the reason why we need to use a P2P protocol to limit the server load. Thanks to WebTorrent, we can make P2P (thus BitTorrent) inside the web browser, as of today.

Features

• Angular frontend
• Join the fediverse
  • Follow other instances
  • Unfollow an instance
  • Get for the followers/following list
• Upload a video
  • Seed the video
  • Send the meta data with ActivityPub to followers
• Remove the video
• List the videos
• View the video in an HTML5 player with WebTorrent
• Admin panel
• OpenGraph tags
• OEmbed
• Update video
• Federated videos view counter
• Federated videos likes/dislikes
• Transcoding to different definitions
• Download file/torrent
• User video bytes quota
• User video channels
• NSFW warnings/settings
• Video description in markdown
• User roles (administrator, moderator)
• User registration
• Video privacy settings (public, unlisted or private)
• Signaling a video to the admin origin PeerTube instance
• Federated videos comments
• Video imports (URL, Torrent, YouTube...)
• Advanced search
• Subtitles
• User playlist
• User subscriptions (by tags, author...)
• Add "DDOS" security

Front compatibility

• Firefox
• Chrome/Chromium

Dependencies

• nginx
• PostgreSQL
• NodeJS >= 8.x
• yarn
• OpenSSL (cli)
• FFmpeg

Production

See the production guide.

Contributing

See the contributing guide to see how to contribute to PeerTube. Spoiler alert: you don't need to be a coder to help!

Architecture

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a more detailed explanation.

Backend

• The backend is a REST API.
• Servers communicate with each others with Activity Pub.
• Each server has its own users who query it (search videos, query where the torrent URI of this specific video is...).
• If a user uploads a video, the server seeds it and sends its followers some metadata (name, short description, torrent URI...).
• A server is a tracker responsible for all the videos uploaded in it.
• Even if nobody watches a video, it is seeded by the server (through WebSeed protocol) where the video was uploaded.

Here are some simple schemes: