Peertube

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A free software to take back control of your videos

Peertube is an open, federated alternative to Youtube without advertising or tracking. On this site, you can find a good Peertube instance, with good rules, good moderation and most importantly a friendly community.

https://joinpeertube.org/

founded 4 years ago

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What prevents PeerTube instances from being used as Popcorn Time? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by ajr@lemmy.ml to c/peertube@lemmy.ml

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Since the videos are shared via p2p when being streamed, what prevents an instance to upload copyrighted material like Popcorn Time? Are there any instances with movies?

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[–] the_tech_beast@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You can upload copyrighted content and basically any video you like on a peertube instance that you host. Most of the public instances don't allow this but if you host your own peertube instance, you are the boss.

But keep in mind one thing, even though peertube supports peer to peer, the file needs to be stored on a central server in this case your instance. This may land you in trouble.

Also, your ip address is public.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Its pretty unfortunate that peertube only supports webtorrent, otherwise it could utilize existing torrents like popcorntime does.

[–] downdaemon@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

libtorrent, that most clients use, supports both now, tho i've had mixed results using it

[–] oliver@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Which libTorrent client is able to webseed? qBittorrent does not know how to handle ws/wss until today (4.4.0).

[–] downdaemon@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Whenever I tried it, it would only download from the webserver source, but it should support web clients too

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I suspect you know this, but in case it isn't clear to others: it isn't that the peertube devs senselessly decided to support some weird incompatible version of bittorrent: the only reason webtorrent exists at all is because it isn't technically possible to speak the normal bittorrent protocol using the networking primitives available in web browsers today.

As more native torrent clients start to support webtorrent alongside normal bittorrent I suspect webtorrent will relieve a lot more load from peertube etc webservers. I have mixed feelings about this, though, as webtorrent is pretty terrible for privacy: instead of just a website operator knowing who is watching what videos when, now any interested party can learn the IPs of every viewer of a specific video.

Privacy aside, webtorrent also raises an interesting plausible deniability against copyright enforcement. If you get caught torrenting, copyright holders can easily argue that you must've been running a torrent client and knew what you were downloading. But now, with web torrent, it is actually possible that any random website you left open could have decided (perhaps some minutes you loaded it) to make your browser into a web torrent peer without your consent or knowledge!

In many countries it is commonly understood that p2p is legally dangerous, because you're committing copyright infringement by becoming a distributor of the copyrighted content, while streaming sites full of pirated content are safe to use because you're just downloading. Web torrent breaks that assumption.