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.
This is the main feature of Peertube. It allows many people to watch the same video simultaneously without totally overwhelming and DDos-ing the server that hosts the video.
Peertube uses webtorrents: https://webtorrent.io/
I did think about building a Chrome extension to do this with Youtube. I wonder if it's possible
Why on earth would you want to help Google saving bandwidth?
Yeah, said like this it sounds stupid 😅