PeerTube

Server

Client

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

Demonstration

PeerTube is not ready for production yet, but you can find a video to see how it looks like.

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 user accounts
  • Inscription
  • Connection
  • Account rights (upload...)
• Make the network auto sufficient (eject bad pods etc)
• Manage API breaks
• Add "DDOS" security (check if a pod don't send too many requests for example)

Installation

Front compatibility

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

Dependencies

• NodeJS >= 4.2
• OpenSSL (cli)
• MongoDB
• ffmpeg xvfb-run libgtk2.0-0 libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libasound2 libxtst6 libxss1 libnotify-bin (for electron)

Debian

• Install NodeJS 4.2: 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 xvfb curl sudo git build-essential libgtk2.0-0 libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libasound2 libxtst6 libxss1 libnotify-bin
  # npm install -g electron-prebuilt
  

Other distribution... (PR welcome)

Sources

$ git clone https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
$ cd PeerTube
$ npm install
$ npm run build

Usage

Run the server

$ npm start

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}. 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 :)

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.

Architecture

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a more detailed explication.

Backend

• The backend whould be a REST API
• Servers would communicate with each others with it
  • Each server of a network has a list of all other servers of the network
  • When a new installed server wants to join a network, it just has to get the list of the servers via one server and tell them "Hi I'm new in the network, communicate with me too please"
  • Each server has its own users who query it (search videos, where the torrent URI of this specific video is...)
  • Server begins to seed and sends to the other servers of the network the video information (name, short description, torrent URI) of a new uploaded video
  • 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 where the video was uploaded
• A server would run webtorrent-hybrid to be a bridge with webrtc/standard bittorrent protocol
• 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:

Frontend

There would be a simple frontend (Bootstrap, AngularJS) but since the backend is a REST API anybody could 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 after having its torrent URI.