Recently the new PeerTube 2.3 edition was released, which is a decentralized platform for organizing video hosting and video broadcasting. PeerTube offers a vendor-independent alternative to YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo, using a P2P-based content distribution network and linking visitors' browsers.
In the new version some improvements stand out that are going focused on federated networks, optimizations of screen space, an automatic lock plugin (alpha) among others, in addition to the developers, following the general trend in the use of inclusive terms, in this new version the function "Videos blacklist" has been renamed "videos blocks / blocklist".
For those unaware of PeerTube they should know that this is based on the use of WebTorrent, running in a browser and uses WebRTC technology to establish a P2P-direct communication channel between the browser and the ActivityPub protocol, allowing disparate servers to be linked with video in the general federated network in which visitors are involved in content delivery and have the ability to subscribe to channels and receive notifications of new videos.
The web interface provided by the project is built using the angular framework.
The federated network of PeerTube is formed as a community of small servers video hosting interconnected, each of which has its own administrator and its own rules can be adopted.
Each server with video plays the role of similar to BitTorrent, in which the user accounts of this server and their videos are located.
The user identifier is formed in the form "@ username @ server_domain". Data transfer during viewing is done directly from the browsers of other visitors viewing the content.
In addition to distributing traffic among users who watch videos, PeerTube also allows sites released by authors for initial video placement cache other authors' videos, forming a distributed network not only from clients, but also from servers, as well as providing fault tolerance.
Main new features of PeerTube 2.3
In this new version one of the novelties that stands out is in improved means of building federated networks, since now additional configuration is provided to stream video to other networks that are not included in the public lists.
Besides that also support for sorting video files by screen resolution was implemented in reverse order. Full video object descriptions are provided via ActivityPub.
Another novelty that accompanies this new version is that an alpha version of the Auto Block Videos plugin has been proposed to allow blocking of videos based on public block lists.
On the other hand in PeerTube 2.3, now moderators have the ability to delete comments in bulk for a given account and disable accounts while viewing thumbnails. Added support for predetermining typical deletion reasons.
Has been added support for global search (disabled by default and requires administrator activation) and the use of all available screen space has been optimized when displaying a grid of thumbnails.
Of the other changes that stand out of this new version:
- The administrator has the ability to define the banner that is displayed on the pages of the current PeerTube instance.
- Added video counter and channel information to "My Videos" page.
- Simplified navigation menu in the administration interface.
- Provided the ability to restrict access to RSS feeds with new videos for specific channels and accounts.
- To process images, instead of the binding Sharp library, the jimp (JavaScript Image Manipulation Program) module is used, written entirely in JavaScript.
Finally, if you want to know more about it, you can check the full list of changes as well as the download links In the following link.