Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2018

schedule

The emPeerTube strikes back

Let's decentralize YouTube !


Presentation of PeerTube, a decentralized video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser and ActivityPub to federate servers.

Attended audience is technical people, or decentralization enthousiasts.

Today, you can't offer an real alternative to Youtube: costs for storage or Internet bandwidth would be so huge that only a few societies can afford it. Some free softwares exist to host your own videos but they don't address the money issue when too much videos are uploaded to your server, or if a video goes viral.

That's where PeerTube comes up! Servers are federated with ActivityPub, a federating protocol built by the W3C (already used in Mastodon) and they send the videos to web browsers with the help of WebTorrent (Bittorrent over WebRTC). The videos are indexed accross federated servers so people can watch a video from instance A on the instance B's web interface. Here's the disk storage cost-killer: just upload your videos on your own instance or one you trust! When viewers are watching the same video at the same time, thanks to WebTorrent, you don't get the videos only from the instance which hosts the video but from the other watchers too. And that's for the bandwith issue.

We will present the project, its technical background and its future developments.

Outline of the talk or goals of the session:

  • Issues with YouTube and why it's hard to offer an alernative (costs)

  • General concepts of PeerTube (federation + P2P) which resolve this issue

  • In-depth explaination of the federation (with ActivityPub handling videos metadata like torrents links, thumbnails, names…)

  • Future eventual developments -> redundancy of videos with webseed

  • Call for developers! Join the revolution!

Speakers

Photo of Luc Didry (Framasky) Luc Didry (Framasky)

Links