Comment by prmoustache
16 hours ago
peertube is in that weird space where the software is good technically but is overkill for home users and small entities[1] and moderation, bandwith and storage cost makes it a bit difficult and expensive to host large public shared instances unless you find a way to monetize it.
I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal video communication platform for a company than a public video streaming platform.
[1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
From hosting a peertube instance solely for my own stuff for several years, I've come to appreciate just how difficult self hosting a streaming video platform is. As you say, bandwidth and storage requirements are significant; another less obvious one is transcoding. When a user uploads an HD video file, it needs to be transcoded into lower resolutions if you want there to be a hope of people streaming it. While Peertube itself is perfectly happy running on 2-4 vcpu cores on a cheap cloud vm, if you use those cores to handle transcode jobs it can take huge amounts of time (like 20+ hours) to transcode even medium length 1080p videos. So you really need either a lot of CPU that sits mostly idle, or hardware acceleration, both of which are expensive when purchased from cloud providers. Or you can use remote transcoding to offload transcode jobs onto your home gaming pc or whatever, which works well, but can be complicated and a bit touchy to set up properly, and now you have a point of failure dependent on your home network...
And then, people watching videos are used to the YouTube experience with its world class CDN infra enabling subsecond first frame latencies even for 4k videos. They go on Peertube and first frame takes like 5 seconds for a 1080p video...realistically, with today's attention spans most of them are going to bounce before it ever plays.
Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope you don't mind me asking:
Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.
Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?
> Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware?
I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p, and depending on server config often several more times. Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial hwaccel on a desktop.
Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often 4k60.
> Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.
If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience. Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb. I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.
I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I wonder if it might be suited for something like https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights, and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?
I shove 1080p mp4s onto a very cheap server and I get 2 seconds of load time there versus somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds on youtube. And looking at network requests, the first chunk of the file loads in well under a second so I'd expect something with the metadata preloaded could start playing at that point. So if peertube takes 5 seconds, I really wonder why.
Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?
If you scale an instance you need to use object storage (s3/b2/etc). Fetch from object storage can occasionally have latency spikes.
5 seconds is somewhat exaggerating, I clicked through 10 or so videos on my instance to check and it's 2-3 seconds most of the time.
The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to watch the video they actually wanted to watch while interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen. This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.
On what setup? All YouTube videos load and start playing instantly for me. Every time I've experienced otherwise in the last couple years, it's been my first indication that e.g. AWS is exploding that day
2 replies →
What value do you get in transcoding your own stuff? I have plex transcoding disabled on all local network devices that stream it and run into minimal issues (codecs on TV devices, mostly).
By "my own stuff" I mean that I use my instance to upload videos I would otherwise upload to youtube - videos I made that I intend to share with people. The usual reasons for transcoding apply.
> if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
Yet people do not do that.
I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that unless it's also done in the other categories.
> find a way to monetize it
If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a desktop client to let you seed in the background then award some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more fitting for something already decentralized.
GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.
> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.
[0] https://docs.taler.net/
[1] https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
Here are some attempts:
LBRY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY
BTT: https://www.kraken.com/learn/what-is-bittorrent-btt
LBRY did that, the US government killed it.
What value would this virtual currency have? Okay, someone seeded some videos and got a token - why should I go and pay them for that token?
Maybe the tokens are how you access the content? Seed to get tokens, spend tokens to get new content. If you don't want to seed, you buy from users who did seed (or resellers).there are many token based comic apps, I wonder how feasible this would be on a small scale like that.
I seed videos to my other computer all day and I'm a trillionaire.
I actually run my own PeerTube instance. I'm mirroring videos in my RSS feeds from Patreon and Youtube there. And I also have a handful of my own family videos.