this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Can someone help me with how peertube P2P works? I can understand how ActivityPub is used for all the "social" parts but I'm a bit confused about the actual video player.

Redundancy:
I have my own instance and I made a redundancy of a video from the blender instance. if I watch the video on my instance I see 2 peers, my instance and the blender one. I can seen both in Firefox dev tools.
If I watch the same video on the blender instance I see 7 peers, the blender instance, mine, and others. why are these extra peers not showing on my instance? do I need to do something? If I watch the video on one of these other instances mine does show up in the their peers list.

I also made a video from framatube redundant but my instance doesn't appear as a peer on framatube.

Client P2P:
If I watch a video does my browser share It over P2P? if so what is the point of this? it seems to lose the video as soon as I leave the page so this functionality seems a bit useless to me.

EDIT: Answered in comments.

BitTorrent:
If I download a video I get the option of a BitTorrent torrent. If I seed this torrent can it be leeched by web clients? I tried and It doesn't show up in the peer list. What's the point of running a full BitTorrent tracker if it doesn't work with the main P2P system?

EDIT: BitTorrent is incompatible with webtorrent that peertube uses. Peertube also uses HLS instead of webtorrent and behaves a bit different (you can't seed it with a webtorrent client).

Peer discovery:
As I said in 1 and 2 how does the player actually find peers? Is there something like DHT or a tracker built in to peertube? if it's an internal tracker how does the tracker find peers?

EDIT: It uses a tracker build in to peertube.

Thanks for any help.

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[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Only partially true nowadays. WebTorrents is a format that PeerTube can use, but is deprecated and non-default in newer releases. Instead, the preferred method now is HLS, which I think is a fair bit more reliable.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hmm, really? That seems to remove the main benefit of Peertube over just hosting a video on any other ActivityPub enabled website.

Is there an explanation somewhere why they decided to depreciate webtorrents?

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They explain the rationale here: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#webtorrent-transcoding-or-hls-transcoding

Basically, it's extremely buggy. HLS with a p2p loader is generally more reliable, with faster loading and higher quality.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks. Hmm, this "HLS with p2p" is not well explained on that page. I guess I'll need to investigate what that does exactly. I assume it is not doing the same client based seeding like webtorrent is able to do?

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I would assume so? I mean, I still see peer stats on the video player, even though all my videos use the HLS format?