Doing my own research before asking here, I understand that PeerTube works similar but not the same as torrent protocol works and it seems to me that it uses the WebTorrent protocol, that means that I “share” fragments of the video I watch, and that the server although not behaving as a peer, provides the information to other servers.

Sincerely, even doing this research, I had many questions…

  • What happens if a video has no peers? Is it simply unplayable?

  • If a video has few peers, will only a part of it be playable?

  • To share fragments of a video I need to be consciously in the video? I mean, in a torrent program I open it in the background and forget about it, but in the case of PeerTube there is no desktop program as such to share in the background the videos I have already watched.

  • If I as a user share a video, and after a while I turn off my PC and I was the only one who saw it, no one else will be able to play the video until I turn on the PC?

  • This will sound stupid, but why do servers have a storage limit per user if the server as such does not share fragments of it?

Thanks and apologies for the stupid questions.

  • hendrik
    6·
    1 year ago

    Well. Lots of it are technical details. The protocol has changed a bit but the way it works is as follows: The server stores the video. It delivers it via HTTP protocol to the viewer. If multiple people watch it simultameously (have the same video opened in their browsers) they help redistributing fragments to each other. This takes some load from the server. Coordination also happens via the server.

    If there are no peers, you get the video delivered by the server. This happens most of the times anyways. It may stutter or take some time to load if the server is too busy.

    Everything is watchable as long as the server is online. If the fragment isn’t offered by someone else, it’s just fetched from the server. If the server goes offline, the page won’t load anymore and the video is gone. this rarely happens or only for maintenance.

    If you close your browser window or click on another video, you leave the swarm and stop redistributing that video.

    The videos are stored by the servers. And people overestimate how much the peer2peer approach works. In reality it’s easily >90% delivered the traditional way by the server to the viewer.