So what's different between Peertube and Youtube, is that Youtube is a single entity with considerable hosting/network resources. They are building their own CDN (developing points of presence across continents), which makes their infra expensive to run, and also reproduces real-world power imbalances such as access to Youtube being real slow (or even impossible) from some countries/regions (eg. sub-Saharan Africa).

Peertube, on the other hand, encourages distribution of content in a peer-to-peer manner. As a person, you can use your favorite Webtorrent [0] client to help seed content from far away servers to your neighbors. As an instance operator, you can opt-in to seeding for another instance (with a disk quota limit) from your own network, helping videos published on the other side of the world reach your local audience.

Example: take three hypothetical FLOSS-oriented instances floss.fr (France) floss.cn (China) and floss.ml (Mali). If those instances all "follow" one another, with sufficient disk quotas, all videos will be replicated across the 3 servers, and video streaming will be smooth from those 3 locations (and neighboring regions).

In all cases, even when initial streaming is slow, Webtorrent scales well because most clients (unless they opt-out) will seed videos via Webtorrent protocol (WebRTC + STUN) so as a video becomes more popular it becomes easier/faster to access without placing the infrastructure/economic burden on the Peertube instance. Clever stuff.

[0] There is a reference Webtorrent client, but libtorrent recently started implementing Webtorrent support so that should become more broadly available "soon".

Worked fine for me with maybe one stutter. Anyway, that's once instance of PT, there are others. E.g. I've never noticed any issues with https://watch.ocaml.org/

Both the videos referenced above worked smoothly for me. I’m on a 30 mbps cable Internet connection.

I guess it depends on the peers.

I have 600 down and it was still choppy on the first load.

I feel like there's a poor buffering algorithm involved. It was a bit choppy for me even though the playback bar indicated that the video had loaded well ahead of time.

Downloading that video with wget took me 0.4 seconds.

Connecting to peertube.tv (peertube.tv)|77.168.118.55|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1058937 (1.0M) [video/mp4] Saving to: ‘de5a56e4-036c-4536-b1a6-4ac45b872516-576.mp4’

de5a56e4-036c-4536- 100%[===================>] 1.01M 2.79MB/s in 0.4s

It also depends a lot on the remote instance, which can be someone's personal PC on a low-bandwidth line. It sure helps if there's more people seeding via the webtorrent integration. I guess the latter will be more of a benefit once PeerTube instances get more active users.

It's working better now, with 144 views. Do more views cause more replication?

Not in a federated (server-to-server) manner: that part is purely opt-in as instances follow one another.

But clients do seed videos by default. You can opt-out of that in the video settings, and if your browser doesn't support WebRTC it will not seed anyway (simply download video over HTTPS).

I believe it is more simultaneous viewers that counts, and they start to upload as well as download while watching (and you can also opt-out of that).

It's not P2P, it's federated. Anybody can host an instance and probably that one has low bandwidth and isn't mirrored by other instances.

Instances like https://tilvids.com/ or https://video.ploud.fr/ have better bandwidth.

>It's not P2P, it's federated.

It's both. PeerTube instances federate with each other, but the video player uses P2P to spread the load between viewers.

Some of the instances choose not to federate with others. For example https://tilvids.com/ Here they explain why: https://mstdn.social/@tilvids/106902477087882284

I'm not sure webtorrent have a way to do peer exchange without centralised trackers like e.g Bittorrents PEX does, so if the core websocket trackers go down, are peers still able to share lists of known peers with each other or is the peer discovery centralised to the webtorrent/websocket trackers?

https://tilvids.com/ has some buffering but was much better compared to other links in this page. I guess the other sites dont have lot of peers in Australia.

Even if a specific video doesn't have a lot of peers, people can setup a server close to you to replicate popular instances you'd like to ease access to.

So you could have a peertube.au instance dedicated to seeding content from other instances on an opt-in basis (instance following other instances, and giving them a certain disk quota).

300mbit connection here, US east coast: Stuttery mess

Oh wow that is shockingly bad. The 10 second video buffered out 5 times while I tried watching. I am on a gigabit fiber connection.

Same experience here on that video.

Ran fine for me first time.