PeerTube: Free software to take back control of your videos | Hacker News Reader

PeerTube: Free software to take back control of your videos

joinpeertube.org

132 pointsdoener37 comments

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Related story already on front page:

"Debian donation for Peertube development" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855183

Submissions with significant voting/discussion in the past 12 months:

"PeerTube 2.1" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22321852 (161 points/8 months ago/29 comments)

"PeerTube v2" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513310 (455 points/11 months ago/152 comments)

Many earlier posts too, for those curious:

"Moving from YouTube to PeerTube" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24222661 (738 points/62 days ago/458 comments)

"We Are Trying Out PeerTube" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214 (242 points/5 months ago/138 comments)

"PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577372 (576 points/July 20, 2018/301 comments)

"PeerTube: A ‘Censorship’ Resistent YouTube Alternative" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17386609 (259 points/June 24, 2018/113 comments)

Literally the first link in "Discover our content selection" leads to an expired domain name [1].

I'm not sure what to make of it but it does seem like a somewhat of a telltale for what's going to happen with my videos should I upload them to one of the PeerTube hosts.

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1 - https://vidcommons.org/videos/watch/4c9cece6-68dc-45be-a657-...

Then choose wisely and pay or get involved with the instance where you upload your videos.

That's 100% true, still a bad look when building a user base though

Has anyone seen something like this with a user-customizable recommendation engine? In the long run, I'd love to have one optimizing for something like "well-rounded education" instead of "time spent on site".

+1 on this!

What else is out there? I know https://lbry.com/ https://watchnebula.com/videos

MediaGoblin, I think. There was the VHS digitization post yesterday and I realized it might be great for me to set up my own instance (or PeerTube) so I can share videos with friends, which would otherwise go unseen because I wouldn't put them up on YouTube.

Not that you were implying it but Nebula isn't decentralised, it's a 50% creator-owned hosting website exclusive to these creators.

Another decentralised system would be https://d.tube.

https://d.tube

Little bit of spam: http://iagovar.com/youtube-alternative

BitChute for conspiracy stuff - https://www.bitchute.com/

I don't think I was not ready to click on this. Feels like 4chan's /b/ in video form.

You can't self host Lbry right?

You can do that. But instead you probably want to run the standard lbry client and distribute your content this way. It will be distributed via a torrent like way to other client users.

Anyone has a list of interesting instances?

I suggest https://spacepub.space by Drew DeVault of SourceHut fame (full disclosure: I'm a creator there)

Thanks for this tip. The live coding / hacking videos are awesome. There's never too much good quality tech "howto" videos available. If you know good sources like this, I'd love to hear.

I really enjoy René Rebe's videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/renerebe

https://conf.tube/ is nice for conferences.

Here's an overview of PeerTube with a search site link, and server instance list linked: https://fediverse.party/en/peertube

There's https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/ for Linux related topics. Disclosure, I am active there as well.

When I click on the first video linked on this page (Aaron Schwartz one) it redirects me to some hijacked domain full of ads :(

Can PeerTube be configured for the less ambitious goal of self-hosted web video hosting (i.e. without peering and federation)?

It seems to support adaptive bitrate, and has a decent enough web player. I don't think there are many Free and Open Source solutions that are up to the task. Even Wikipedia uses a very bare-bones solution, without adaptive bitrate: it just points the browser at a .webm file.

I think yes. I checked the docs and to accomplish this you can basically lock down your instance for registration only (that you need to approve) and you can make sure you only follow your own instances. That way you could even setup a 3 Node ReplicaSet of PeerTube instances, only serving your personal videos for High Availability!

Out of curiosity, why is adaptive bitrate something you want for video playback outside of streaming? Personally I prefer having to buffer a bit but getting the video at the desired minimum quality. E.g. having to seek back because text suddenly became unintelligible, only to realize that the quality then isn't increased so I have to refresh... argh, very upsetting!

> why is adaptive bitrate something you want for video playback outside of streaming?

I don't follow. Adaptive bitrate only applies to streaming.

> having to seek back because text suddenly became unintelligible

That's an issue with the minimum quality being set too low, not an issue with adaptive bitrate itself.

By streaming I meant live streaming as opposed to video playback. There one can offer the video at different qualities by switching between different files, or change the quality adaptively within the same stream.

I'm not aware of sites using a minimum quality for adaptive streaming. It usually goes down all the way to potato quality, without a visible setting..?

Peertube seems like a very nice idea. I think I will create my own instance.

But is it possible to configure a locked down instance, so that not anyone can upload videos? Because I would like to publish videos myself but prohibit others from uploading videos on my instance.

Thanks

sure, you can control that.

For whom like decentralized web, it's also worthwhile to take a look on http://joinmastodon.org

Is headless seeding with low overhead doable yet?

How can you monetize this as a content creator?

Can you feed ads to your audience?

Can you search across instances yet?

Yes, I developed a search engine across hundreds of Peertube instances:

https://peertube-search.com/

It's built with Laravel / SOLR, and has free-text search, language, category, license filtering support etc.

Also sorely lacking, federated user accounts (alla Diaspora) to comment and vote.

https://sepiasearch.org/ was recently introduced which is quite nice for searching.

Yes, there is global search since v2.3.0 (current newest version is 2.4.0); however it has to be explicitly enabled by the instance so not every instance has it.

It's listed on the roadmap but the roadmap isn't really clear on whats implemented and whats not.

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