PeerTube

Federated (ActivityPub) video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser with WebTorrent.

PeerTube is sponsored by Framasoft, a non-profit that promotes, spreads and develops free culture in general, and free-libre software in particular. If you want to support this project, please consider donating them.

Client

Server

Demonstration

Want to see it in action?

• Demo server
• 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 may not have enough money to pay for bandwidth and video storage of its servers.

So we need to have a decentralized network of servers seeding videos (as Diaspora for example). But it's not enough 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, as of today.

Features

• Frontend
  • Angular frontend
• Join the fediverse
  • Follow other instances
  • Unfollow an instance
  • Get for the followers/following list
• Upload a video
  • Seed the video
  • Send the meta data with ActivityPub to followers
• Remove the video
• List the videos
• View the video in an HTML5 player with WebTorrent
• Admin panel
• OpenGraph tags
• OEmbed
• Update video
• Videos view counter
• Videos likes/dislikes
• Transcoding to different definitions
• Download file/torrent
• User video bytes quota
• User video channels
• NSFW warnings/settings
• Video description in markdown
• User roles (administrator, moderator)
• User registration
• Video privacy settings (public, unlisted or private)
• Signaling a video to the admin origin PeerTube instance
• Videos comments
• User playlist
• User subscriptions (by tags, author...)
• Add "DDOS" security

Installation

See wiki for complete installation commands.

Front compatibility

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

Dependencies

• NodeJS >= 8.x
• yarn
• OpenSSL (cli)
• PostgreSQL
• FFmpeg

Debian

1. Install NodeJS 8.x (current LTS): https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions
2. Install yarn: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install
3. Run:

    $ apt-get update
    $ apt-get install ffmpeg postgresql openssl

Ubuntu 16.04

1. Install NodeJS 8.x (current LTS): (same as Debian)
2. Install yarn: (same as Debian)
3. Run:

    $ apt-get update
    $ apt-get install ffmpeg postgresql openssl

Arch Linux

1. Run:

    $ pacman -S nodejs yarn ffmpeg postgresql openssl

Other distributions

Feel free to update this README file in a pull request!

Build from the sources

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

Usage

Production

If you want to run PeerTube in production (which might be a bad idea for now :) ):

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

Then edit the config/production.yaml file according to your webserver configuration. Keys set in this file will override those of config/default.yml.

Finally, run the server with the NODE_ENV environment variable set to production:

    $ NODE_ENV=production npm start

The administrator password is automatically generated and can be found in the logs. You can set another password with:

    $ NODE_ENV=production npm run reset-password -- -u root

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-peertube
    # systemctl start peertube

Test with three fresh nodes

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

Then you will get 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.

Other commands

To print all available commands, run:

    $ npm run help

Contributing

See the contributing guide to see how to contribute to PeerTube. Spoiler alert: you don't need to be a coder to help!

Architecture

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a more detailed explanation.

Backend

• The backend is a REST API.
• Servers communicate with each others with Activity Pub.
• Each server has its own users who query it (search videos, query where the torrent URI of this specific video is...).
• If a user uploads a video, the server seeds it and sends its followers some metadata (name, short description, torrent URI...).
• 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 (through WebSeed protocol) where the video was uploaded.

Here are some simple schemes: