PeerTube

Prototype of a decentralized video streaming platform using P2P (bittorrent) directly in the web browser with WebTorrent.

Client

Server

Demonstration

Want to see in action?

• You can directly test in your browser with this demo server. Don't forget to use the latest version of Firefox/Chromium/(Opera?) and check your firewall configuration (for WebRTC)
• You can find a video to see how the "decentralization feature" looks like
• Experimental demo servers that share videos (they are in the same network): peertube2, peertube3. Since I do experiments with them, sometimes they might not work correctly.

Why

We can't build a FOSS video streaming alternatives to YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo... with a centralized software. One organization alone cannot have enought money to pay bandwith and video storage of its server.

So we need to have a decentralized network (as Diaspora for example). But it's not enought 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 right now.

Features

• Frontend
  • Simple frontend (All elements are generated by jQuery)
  • Angular 2 frontend
• Join a network
  • Generate a RSA key
  • Ask for the friend list of other pods and make friend with them
  • Get the list of the videos owned by a pod when making friend with it
  • Post the list of its own videos when making friend with another pod
• Quit a network
• Upload a video
  • Seed the video
  • Send the meta data to all other friends
• Remove the video
• List the videos
• Search a video name (local index)
• View the video in an HTML5 page with WebTorrent
• Manage admin account
  • Connection
  • Account rights (upload...)
• Make the network auto sufficient (eject bad pods etc)
• Validate the prototype (test PeerTube in a real world with many pods and videos)
• Manage API breaks
• Add "DDOS" security (check if a pod don't send too many requests for example)
• Admin panel
  • Stats
  • Friends list
  • Manage users (create/remove)
• OpenGraph tags
• User playlists
• User subscriptions (by tags, author...)
• Signaling a video to the admin pod

Installation

Front compatibility

• Chromium
• Firefox (>= 42 for MediaSource support)

Dependencies

• NodeJS >= 4.x
• npm >= 3.x
• OpenSSL (cli)
• MongoDB
• ffmpeg

Debian

• Install NodeJS 4.x (actual LTS): https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions

• Add jessie backports to your source.list: http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/

• Run:

  # apt-get update
  # apt-get install ffmpeg mongodb openssl
  # npm install -g npm@3
  

Other distribution... (PR welcome)

Sources

$ git clone https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
$ cd PeerTube
$ npm install # Or npm install --unsafe-perm for root user
$ npm run build

Usage

Development

$ npm run dev

Test with 3 fresh nodes

$ npm run clean:server:test
$ npm run play

Then you will can access to the three nodes at http://localhost:900{1,2,3} with the root as username and test{1,2,3} for the password. If you call "make friends" on http://localhost:9002, the pod 2 and 3 will become friends. Then if you call "make friends" on http://localhost:9001 it will become friend with the pod 2 and 3 (check the configuration files). Then the pod will communicate with each others. If you add a video on the pod 3 you'll can see it on the pod 1 and 2 :)

Production

If you want to run PeerTube for production (bad idea for now :) ):

$ cp config/production.yaml.example config/production.yaml

Then edit the config/production.yaml file according to your webserver configuration.

Finally, run the server with the production NODE_ENV variable set.

$ NODE_ENV=production npm start

Nginx template (reverse proxy): https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/tree/master/support/nginx

Systemd template: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/tree/master/support/systemd

You can check the application (CORS headers, tracker websocket...) by running:

$ NODE_ENV=production npm run check

Upgrade

The following commands will upgrade the source (according to your current branch), upgrade node modules and rebuild client application:

# systemctl stop peertube
$ npm run upgrade
# systemctl start peertube

Other commands

To print all available command run:

$ npm run help

Dockerfile

You can test it inside Docker with the PeerTube-Docker repository. Moreover it can help you to check how to create an environment with the required dependencies for PeerTube on a GNU/Linux distribution.

Contributing

See the contributing guide.

See the server code documentation.

Architecture

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a more detailed explication.

Backend

• The backend is a REST API
• Servers communicate with each others through it
  • A network is composed by servers that communicate between them
  • Each server of a network has a list of all other servers of this network
  • When a new installed server wants to join a network, it just has to get the servers list through a server that is already in the network and tell "Hi I'm new in the network, communicate with me and share me your servers list please". Then the server will "make friend" with each server of this list
  • Each server has its own users who query it (search videos, where the torrent URI of this specific video is...)
  • If a user upload a video, the server seeds it and sends the video informations (name, short description, torrent URI...) to each server of the network
  • Each server has a RSA key to encrypt and sign communications with other servers
• 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 (throught WebSeed protocol) where the video was uploaded
• A network can live and evolve by expelling bad pod (with too many downtimes for example)

See the ARCHITECTURE.md for more informations. Do not hesitate to give your opinion :)

Here are some simple schemes:

<img src="https://lutim.cpy.re/PqpTTzdP" alt="Many networks"

Frontend

There already is a frontend (Angular 2) but the backend is a REST API so anybody can build a frontend (Web application, desktop application...). The backend uses BitTorrent protocol, so users could use their favorite BitTorrent client to download/play the video with its torrent URI.