PeerTube

Federated (ActivityPub) video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser with WebTorrent.

PeerTube is sponsored by Framasoft, a non-profit that promotes, spreads and develops free culture in general, and free-libre software in particular. If you want to support this project, please consider donating to them.

Client

Server

Demonstration

Want to see it in action?

• Demonstration servers:
  • peertube.cpy.re
  • peertube2.cpy.re
  • peertube3.cpy.re
• Video to see what 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 may not have enough money to pay for bandwidth and video storage of its servers.

So we need to have a decentralized network of servers seeding videos (as Diaspora for example). But it's not enough 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, as of today.

Dependencies

• nginx
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• NodeJS >= 8.x
• yarn
• OpenSSL (cli)
• FFmpeg >= 3.x

Run using Docker

See the docker guide

Production

See the production guide.

Contributing/Test

See the contributing guide to see how to test or contribute to PeerTube. Spoiler alert: you don't need to be a coder to help!

API REST documentation

For now only on Github:

• HTML version: /support/doc/api/html/index.html
• Swagger/OpenAPI schema: /support/doc/api/openapi.yaml

Tools

• Import videos (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo...)
• Upload videos from the CLI

FAQ

If you have a question, please try to find the answer in the FAQ first.

Architecture

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a more detailed explanation.

Backend

• The backend is a REST API.
• Servers communicate with each others with Activity Pub.
• Each server has its own users who query it (search videos, query where the torrent URI of this specific video is...).
• If a user uploads a video, the server seeds it and sends its followers some metadata (name, short description, torrent URI...).
• 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 (through WebSeed protocol) where the video was uploaded.

Here are some simple schemes: