this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Peertube

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A free software to take back control of your videos

Peertube is an open, federated alternative to Youtube without advertising or tracking. On this site, you can find a good Peertube instance, with good rules, good moderation and most importantly a friendly community.

https://joinpeertube.org/

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How does PeerTube work? (lemmy.one)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Doing my own research before asking here, I understand that PeerTube works similar but not the same as torrent protocol works and it seems to me that it uses the WebTorrent protocol, that means that I "share" fragments of the video I watch, and that the server although not behaving as a peer, provides the information to other servers.

Sincerely, even doing this research, I had many questions...

  • What happens if a video has no peers? Is it simply unplayable?

  • If a video has few peers, will only a part of it be playable?

  • To share fragments of a video I need to be consciously in the video? I mean, in a torrent program I open it in the background and forget about it, but in the case of PeerTube there is no desktop program as such to share in the background the videos I have already watched.

  • If I as a user share a video, and after a while I turn off my PC and I was the only one who saw it, no one else will be able to play the video until I turn on the PC?

  • This will sound stupid, but why do servers have a storage limit per user if the server as such does not share fragments of it?

Thanks and apologies for the stupid questions.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not affiliated with Peertube development so this is just my understanding, but a video is hosted by the website just like any other platform, so a video without peers will stream you that copy and that's also why there is a storage limit.

Sharing a video over the WebTorrent protocol is mainly to speed up the streaming when say someone is closer to you than the server sharing that video.

Afaik, Peertube instances do allow you to copy a video's magnet link for you to seed with your torrent client if you're feeling generous. Anyone else feel free to correct me if anything is wrong.