The release of PeerTube 2.1 has been announced. PeerTube is a decentralized platform for organizing, hosting, and distributing videos . It offers a vendor-independent alternative to YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo, using a P2P-based content distribution network and linking visitors' browsers. The project's developments are distributed under the AGPLv3 license.
PeerTube is based on the use of the BitTorrent WebTorrent Client, which runs in a browser and uses WebRTC technology to establish a P2P channel—direct communication between the browser and the ActivityPub protocol—allowing disparate servers to be joined with video in the overall federated network where visitors are involved in content delivery and have the ability to subscribe to channels and receive notifications of new videos.
The PeerTube federated network is formed as a community of small, interconnected video hosting servers, each of which has its own administrator and can adopt its own rules.
Each video server plays the role of a BitTorrent tracker, containing user accounts for that server and its videos.
In addition to distributing traffic among users watching videos, PeerTube also allows sites launched by authors for initial video placement to cache other authors' videos, forming a distributed network not only from clients, but also from servers, in addition to providing fault tolerance.
To start streaming through PeerTube, a user only needs to upload a video , a description, and a set of tags to one of the servers.
After that, the video will be available throughout the federated network , not just from the main download server. To work with PeerTube and participate in content distribution, a standard web browser is all that's needed; no additional software installation is required.
Main new features of PeerTube 2.1
In this new version of PeerTube 2.1, user feedback on improving the interface was taken into account, so animation effects were added when starting and stopping video playback, and the icons and buttons on the video viewing page were redesigned.
For authorized users, when they mouse over the video thumbnail, an icon with a clock now appears to add the video to the Watch List.
The 'About' page has been redesigned with a project presentation, offering quick access to additional applications and documentation. The documentation has been substantially supplemented and many new guides have been proposed for configuring and diagnosing problems.
The options for commenting on videos were also improved, with a new comment design in which the original comments and the replies to them are clearly separated.
The display has been improved, with avatars and usernames now more legible. Responses submitted by the video's author are now displayed, and two display modes have been implemented: one sorted by when the comment was submitted and the other by the number of responses.
Markdown markup can now be used in text , and options have been added to hide messages from a specific participant or site.
Another of the changes that stands out is the new option for "video for internal use" in private mode, which allows publishing videos only for users connected to the current server, where the video was originally uploaded. The specified mode can be used to organize access to confidential videos of certain user groups, such as friends, family, or co-workers.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Automatic hyperlink generation was implemented at a certain point in the video when the time (mm: ss oh: mm: ss) is mentioned in the description or comments.
- A JavaScript library has been prepared with the API to manage video embedding in pages.
- Added ability to generate HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) video stream using create-transcoding-job script. In particular, it is possible to disable WebTorrent and use only HLS.
- Added support for video in m4v format.
- An infrastructure has been released to jointly translate the interface into different languages ​​using the Weblate service.