So I’m not sure if y’all are following this series, its insane and it gets really dark. I highly recommend.

Anyway, the scary thing is how much control big tech and the oligarchy, corrupt police, (and Scientology) has over squashing justice and doing anything they can to keep the little guy down.

Just an example of why we desperately NEED to get people off these platforms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7_InQEaHQA&t=1217

  • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    21 days ago

    Seeding was a thing with webtorrent, then they defaulted to their new HLS method and it is now practically unused. You can still download the entire file via torrent on some instances.

    Their problem was they needed to be able to stream chunks of the video via webtorrent and also switch between different resolutions. Supposedly that isn’t true, but I do believe it is ( I’ve seen other people talk about possible implementations). Dunno if the maintainers are actually receptive to a webtorrent HLS or DASH solution.

      • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        Webtorrents are torrents that run in the browser. From my understanding, they have all the features of torrents except that they run in WebRTC (because browsers don’t directly speak torrent). If they do, then requesting specific chunks of torrents should be possible. Therefore, it should be possible to have torrents by resolution.

        There could be preferences per user / per session to allow customisation of the seeding preferences with reasonable defaults depending on network speed.

        As for hard drive space, it probably won’t be an issue. Users can selectively seed what they want by using qBittorrent which supports WebTorrent. If there were thus a webtorrent solution, tools could also be written to download and seed videos depending on preferences e.g most watched videos, least watched videos, hottest videos in last 24 hours, maybe even a protocol where the server dynamically requests seeders depending on which video is being streamed by users, and so on and so forth.

        WebTorrents in peertube could really change the video distribution game altogether.

          • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            20 days ago

            Torrents alleviate the distribution problem, not the storage problem. You can’t tell me that distribution isn’t a problem. A few federated instances won’t be able to scale viewership if it goes into 1M concurrent views or so. Hell, even 100 or 1k streaming a 1080p video can easily bring a server to its knees.

            There have been proposals to use IPFS for storage, but frankly, IPFS is nowhere near ready for production usage.

              • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                20 days ago

                I’m not sure you’re aware, but peertube also federates videos. Instances can choose to federate the metadata and the data too. That means if one instance goes down, there’s a chance the data will be available on another peertube instance. Furthermore, as I said, using webtorrents will allow alternative clients (like qBittorrent) to store copies of the data. That’s why I brought up (maybe in another comment) tools written around that which could, independently or with coordination from an instance, download and see the X “hottest” videos of the day, most viewed videos of interval Y, or whatever else.

                Regarding torrents solving the storage problem: it’s possible. The main instance where the video is uploaded to will still have to keep the primary copy of the video and all the different resolutions. You can’t just upload the video, make a torrent, and then delete the content. It will have to be distributed to be kept redundant. And if the primary copy is deleted without any redundancy, you will have a problem. You could hope that all federated instances copy the data and that many do-gooders (probably archivists) decide to seed every video of every instance out there, but I think it’s more likely that popular videos will be seeded and obscure videos only exist once on one instance.

                One could imagine the main instance deleting the content after a certain seed threshold has been reached (e.g 500 seeders have 100% of the file), but that could be easily abused: somebody wants to take down a video and controls a few hundred IPs --> tell the instance you have 100% of the file, instance deletes video --> video is gone. So, again, I don’t think it solves the storage problem. Federation could though. If instances have a max number of users they accept, users would have to spread out across instances and thus distribute the storage requirements.

                In any case, webtorrents would improve the current situation. Right now in order to duplicate a video and contribute bandwidth, you must run an entire peertube instance. It’s simply the “easiest” way to do so. Nobody, to my knowledge, has successfully written a minimal client that just communicates with instances and downloads, then hosts the video files and makes itself aware to instances as another instance (though stripped down).
                Webtorrents would allow somebody to just grab the torrent file (or magnet link) paste it into qbittorrent, and be part of the swarm without having to go through weird hoops or run an entire instance.