PeerTube: a decentralized alternative to YouTube?

[14:25 Tue,16.October 2018 by Thomas Richter]

A P2P video portal independent of large corporations such as Google or Facebook is the goal of the open source PeerTube project, the development of which was organized by the French non-profit organization Framasoft, financed by crowdfunding with 51,000 euros and which is now officially launched after a beta phase with version 1.0.

PeerTube is not commercial, i.e. no ads are displayed and user behavior is not tracked. PeerTube works according to the principle of many independent but networked P2P servers, which are each administered according to their own rules and store and deliver videos from users.

Using PeerTube software, based on WebTorrent technology and the ActivityPub protocol, anyone with the necessary hardware (a web server) and bandwidth can run their own server, an instance. The servers can share their videos with each other to form a virtual network with a common video catalog. The different servers have (depending on the resources) different rules regarding the content and data limits regarding the maximum upload per user. If several users watch the same video at the same time (or if the corresponding browser tab is still open), the P2P aspect of the concept comes into play, because then parts of the video are transferred from one user to another.

As with Vimeo or YouTube, reencoding to 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p takes place after the upload - the user can view the videos in the browser and then has the choice of resolution. The uploader can enter a description, a category for his video, mark it as NSFW (Not safe for work), determine the preview image and give the viewer information on how to support his work.

Here provides an overview of the currently active PeerTube instances. (Thanks to cantsin)

more infos at bei joinpeertube.org

deutsche Version dieser Seite: PeerTube: eine freie P2P-Alternative zu YouTube