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.
Would it not make more sense if your instance downloaded and redistributed the torrent? then you could keep seeding after the tab closed. it also wouldn’t leak your IP then.
What about peer discovery? I opened that webtorrent website in two browsers and they didn’t peer, is that demo real?
This is about visitors re-seeding the video they watch, but yes like all p2p systems it leaks their IP to other peers.
Why not also use the instance to re-seed? it could keep seeding after the visitor closed the video.
AFAIK it does, but if the instance seeds it then that is no different from hosting the video directly on the website, thus this doesn’t help with bandwidth at all.
why? if 5 instances are seeding the video, clients should be able to download from all 5 instances and spread the bandwidth usage right?
Other Peertube instance are not hosting the video at all AFAIK. The ActivityPub federation and the webtorrent p2p bandwidth off-load are two fully separate things.