i have been wanting to try creating an instance of peertube to host my videos on. if interested i recommend reading a little more about the project here https://joinpeertube.org/
in short it is an open-source decentrilized video platform. two interesting things about it:
it is federated, using ActivityPub to communicate between instances, basically this means if another similar community started also an instance for their art videos these instances can follow each other and share the videos, users, comments etc without needing everything on a central server
it uses webTorrent for peer-to-peer sharing of video info. this means if many people are watching the same video at once they will share chucks of it between themselves, saving the server from becoming overloaded.
ofcourse being open-source also empowers us to customize it to suit the specific needs of this community. (eg i know peertube is using ffmpeg for transcoding - maybe there are tweaks we know serve video-art better ? )
setup details
one thing stopping me trying this in the past was the cost of diskspace on virtual machines. the $5per month droplet (1cpu/1Mb ram) im currently using has only 25Gb of storage. the breakthrough came when experimenting with static object storage (like s3). using a program called s3fs it is possible to mount a s3-like bucket as a filesystem. i created an account with wasabi getting 1Tb of storage for $5 per month. (i also created a small plugin to auth seamlessly with discourse) if you are interested in more technical details i have been documenting them here
this setup on a 1cpu droplet worked well for me alone in my tests. (and for ~$10 a month is still a better deal then other hosting platforms i looked into ) encoding a 1hour video took upto an hour (probably blocking the whole cpu), so if many more people are using this we might want to consider upgrading the machine. im not sure how interested others here are in an alternative video platform ? but together maybe we could maintain something (open and ethical) for this whole community for not much more than the price of a single vimeo pro account ? lets see
Yeah will be fun to try it out when streaming is implemented- we already have a streaming server set up for scanlines so it doesn’t matter too much for now , but maybe the peertube version will intergrate better in the end let’s see !
It’s encouraging to see the Peertube project managed to stick to their roadmap. Apparently the live streaming development is almost over and the feature is now available in the develop branch of v2.4 (we run on 2.2).
At last I’ve started playing with our instance, I’ve been uploading some clips and checking the features, it works well and it looks cool. Thanks for setting up another efficient tool for this beautiful community <3
a small detail very appreciated (as the setup info on GitHub)
i should have some time next week - can try updating us to the dev branch if people are interested in trying the live stream feature.
logistically im not sure what would be best to do here; currently we have:
$10pm droplet running the chat & our custom streaming
$5pm droplet running peertube
it is likely (especially with transcoding / persisting enabled) that the $5 peertube droplet will be too little. we could try it on a $10 one and see how that goes… we could also try the chat on $5 droplet again perhaps, since it is nice to have but pretty quiet most of the time.
i think we should keep the chat / streaming droplet at $10 because i would prefer to avoid the crashing issue again, we do use the streaming service pretty often at this point on top of rocket chat.
i would say let’s try out peertube’s livestream branch and then maybe we can bump it up if needed. it’s possible that we will prefer streaming on there and it could be a replacement for our current system, or maybe it’s too soon and buggy. would it be possible to revert if we want to roll back from the beta build ?
if $ is an issue i could throw down some to help beef up the peertube server while we try things out!
Yeap happy to keep chat droplet as is. (Still not 100% sure the single crash was memory related , but agree the chat has been p stable since bumping it)
actually we are doing quite ok for $$ rn (it fluctuates but last email I got said receiving $6.65 / $7 needed from 6 donors - someone plz increase our amount by 0.01 lol )
I don’t think it will be a problem to roll back the version if we want to. Will take a look anyway
Can’t get the embed test to play, do I need to wait a long time, or something else need to be done for setup? I’m also trying on safari btw. Just get a loading circle for the last 15 minutes or so.
Right now I get the same as @Dr_Rek. However the 720p and 1080p versions actually start playing for a fraction of seconds, before hanging again.
It plays correctly on its own page.
It’s a general temporary problem: it’s also happening with the 2 clips in the first post at Uploads on videos.scanlines.xyz stuck at "video is being transcoded" which were playing without issues around 5 hours ago. It may be related to what’s being discussed there, whatever it turns out to be.
BTW thanks @cyberboy666 for trusting me with the admin rights. I haven’t got into the Peertube admin interface yet.
can you all please check (and correct where needed) videos.scanlines? it was empty, so I copy/pasted there excerpts about our Peertube instance from various threads
if you start new threads and mention Peertube please use the #peertube tag. I just created it and tagged various threads
i created a thread to collect random Peertube things and I’m thinking of creating another one for errors and issues only
Small update to logging into our peertube instance - weve seen a recent uptick in off-topic/spam/hate posted on there lately so have made it harder to get access to people not coming from this forum:
to access your account on the peertube: first make sure you are logged in on the main forum, then click the orange “join” button on the peertube
Now if you try to join without already being logged in here you will be met wjth unauthorized and no further prompts on how to get access
The Home page of videos.scanlines.xyz is looking a little sad. Other instances seem to eschew a Home page in favour of directing to Local Videos. Considering the info on Home is already on the About page maybe we could do this too?
a small detail very appreciated (as the setup info on GitHub)
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