Can someone help me with how peertube P2P works? I can understand how ActivityPub is used for all the “social” parts but I’m a bit confused about the actual video player.

Redundancy:
I have my own instance and I made a redundancy of a video from the blender instance. if I watch the video on my instance I see 2 peers, my instance and the blender one. I can seen both in Firefox dev tools.
If I watch the same video on the blender instance I see 7 peers, the blender instance, mine, and others. why are these extra peers not showing on my instance? do I need to do something? If I watch the video on one of these other instances mine does show up in the their peers list.

I also made a video from framatube redundant but my instance doesn’t appear as a peer on framatube.

Client P2P:
If I watch a video does my browser share It over P2P? if so what is the point of this? it seems to lose the video as soon as I leave the page so this functionality seems a bit useless to me.

EDIT: Answered in comments.

BitTorrent:
If I download a video I get the option of a BitTorrent torrent. If I seed this torrent can it be leeched by web clients? I tried and It doesn’t show up in the peer list. What’s the point of running a full BitTorrent tracker if it doesn’t work with the main P2P system?

EDIT: BitTorrent is incompatible with webtorrent that peertube uses. Peertube also uses HLS instead of webtorrent and behaves a bit different (you can’t seed it with a webtorrent client).

Peer discovery:
As I said in 1 and 2 how does the player actually find peers? Is there something like DHT or a tracker built in to peertube? if it’s an internal tracker how does the tracker find peers?

EDIT: It uses a tracker build in to peertube.

Thanks for any help.

  • Thomas@lemmy.douwes.co.ukOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have done some testing and I found a few reasons I’m having issues with webtorrent:

    • The only reason they where working at all is because they were downloading from the HTTP URL in the torrent file, P2P was not working at all.

    • To download the webtorrent from the blender instance I need to have the video watched in my browser to peer with the webtorrent client, the instance peers don’t work on non-peertube webtorrent clients.

    • The reason instant.io was broken is my adblocker was blocking the tracker.

    • The tracker in my peertube instance is broken.

    EDIT:
    I was a bit wrong here, there are two different formats in peertube: webtorrent and HLS. I was getting confused why the video on my instance (HLS) and the one on the blender one (webtorrent) was behaving differently with webtorrent clients. They are completely different formats so that makes sense now.