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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Anyone want to take bets that Google would eventually try to deprecate whatever API peertube needs because of some plausibly true "security reason" in the next few years?

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I'd take a bet against, because peertube transport can be essentially implemented in the same way as video calls. As long as Google Meet works in the browser, peertube can too. (I'm not saying it works that way right now)

Risky, WebRTC isn't quite P2P, the sending peer still has to sort of spend the resources to send to all participants. It's a full mesh but you'd want something more open. You'll also have to consider DDoS protections for streamers.

I'm not sure what you mean... why would webrtc spend any more resources than the current solution?

WebRTC in Videochats usually employs 1:1 P2P, meaning everyone builds a peer connection to everyone else. So for N people you have N connections carrying your traffic M, so the total bandwidth is NM.

For torrent P2P you get clusters of peers sharing data, you don't have to send data to every peer, the usual outcome is logarithmic, so you connect to log(N) peers for N participants with total bandwidth being log(N)M.

That's only because for video chats you need a full mesh in p2p. There's no requirement for that in webrtc itself which would be just the transport protocol in your case. You can also send only the selected chunks rather than stream the whole file.

But then you basically do what webtorrent already does, why reinvent it for no reason?

The whole premise of this thread is the speculation: "Google would eventually try to deprecate whatever API peertube needs". My answer to that is "basically do what webtorrent already does" (but using a different API)

Looks like it'll be pretty resilient in the basic case from an web/tech perspective. They fetch the video content using plain HTTP against a video file hosted on a URL, getting it in small chunks using HTTP range headers. That's as basic as you can get it.

Google is deprecating APIs left and right. For example, Google Music users were migrated over to YouTube Music as Google Music was deprecated. Google Music had an API you could develop against, YouTube Music lacks any such API, leaving people like me in the lurch.

I doubt it's ever gonna become a thing Google even notices.

duckduckgo

Not equivalent at all. DDG gathers the content they provide themselves. Video sites rely on users for content, which is why critical mass matters. Why get 100 views on peertube when you can 100000 views on Youtube?

> DDG gathers the content they provide themselves.

You know that DDG mostly relies on Bing for their search index right?

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1

There are a lot of legal content that is banned. I have seen videos banned on dermatologist's channel due to obscene skin rashes. Same anything that spills blood etc. When it comes to politically controversial any commercial company has to take side with ruling party and ban the videos. PeerTube is alluring to them. Critical mass is not an issue IMO

What youtube APIs does peertube need? Does peertube need youtube? AFAIK it's its own service with no youtube dependency.

Does peertube use Google API at all?

I think they probably meant a Chrome/browser API.

funny and depressing at the same time

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