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PeerTube

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

Client
Dependency Status devDependency Status

Server
Build Status Dependencies Status devDependency Status Code climate
js-standard-style

screenshot

Demonstration

Want to see in action?

  • You can directly test in your browser with this demo server. Don't forget to use the latest version of Firefox/Chromium/(Opera?) and check your firewall configuration (for WebRTC)
  • You can find a video to see how the "decentralization feature" 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 admin account
    • Connection
    • Account rights (upload...)
  • Make the network auto sufficient (eject bad pods etc)
  • Validate the prototype (test PeerTube in a real world with many pods and videos)
  • Manage API breaks
  • Add "DDOS" security (check if a pod don't send too many requests for example)
  • Admin panel
    • Stats about the network (how many friends, how many requests per hour...)
    • Stats about videos
    • Manage users (create/remove)

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

Other distribution... (PR welcome)

Sources

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

Usage

Development

$ 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 :)

Production

If you want to run PeerTube for production (bad idea for now :) ):

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

Then edit the config/production.yaml file according to your webserver configuration.

Finally, run the server with the production NODE_ENV variable set.

$ NODE_ENV=production npm start

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:

Decentralized Watch a video Watch a P2P video Join a network

<img src="https://lutim.cpy.re/udTMqcb0" alt="Many networks"

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.