5.1 KiB
PeerTube
Prototype of a decentralized video streaming platform using P2P (bittorrent) directly in the web browser with webtorrent.
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)
- AngularJS 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 user accounts
- Inscription
- Connection
- Account rights (upload...)
- Make the network auto sufficient (eject bad pods etc)
- Manage API breaks
- Add "DDOS" security (check if a pod don't send too many requests for example)
Usage
Front compatibility
- Chromium
- Firefox (>= 42 for MediaSource support)
Dependencies
- NodeJS >= 4.2
- Grunt-cli (npm install -g grunt-cli)
- OpenSSL (cli)
- MongoDB
- xvfb-run libgtk2.0-0 libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libasound2 libxtst6 libxss1 (for electron)
Test It!
$ git clone https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
$ cd PeerTube
# npm install -g electron-prebuilt
$ npm install
$ npm start
Test with 3 fresh nodes
$ scripts/clean_test.sh
$ scripts/run_servers.sh
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 :)
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:
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.