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  • Max Almontemaxalmonte14
    Sep 7, 2026, 7:30 PM

    I've been thinking — which doesn't happen often — wouldn't a peer-to-peer video sharing platform be entirely possible? No servers involved (unless you decide to rent a seedbox), your machine is the host, viewers seed the videos by simply watching, clients manage video conversion and other related stuff through ffmpeg (subtitles are added to a .mkv container), videos play locally through VLC, other metadata like thumbnails is managed somehow(?). A kind of "PeerTube" if you like.

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Replies

  • Max Almontemaxalmonte14
    Sep 7, 2026, 8:04 PM

    Wondering how hard can it be putting a prototype together? The absolute bare minimum would be a Windows/Linux/Android app capable of converting video via ffmpeg, and sharing a folder's content with all peers, plus being able to see other peers videos 🤔

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  • fabiosantoscodefabiosantoscode@mastodon.social
    Sep 7, 2026, 8:21 PM

    @maxalmonte14 I think I found something like that in 2014 but there's no way I'll find it again.

    You can look into something like BitTorrent protocol and work on top of it. WebTorrent if you're interested on making this peer tube a website and play videos there.

    What's missing here is discovering torrents (your videos) to play, through search or following channels or whatnot.

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  • fabiosantoscodefabiosantoscode@mastodon.social
    Sep 7, 2026, 8:24 PM

    @maxalmonte14 if you compile ffmpeg to webassembly you could encode in the browser.

    Hopefully there's a video format every browser likes.

    You can store files with the new filesystem web APIs.

    And you can encourage seeding using a seed-for-seed protocol. If you seed, you gain credit for others to seed your videos.

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  • Max Almontemaxalmonte14
    Sep 8, 2026, 1:57 PM

    @fabiosantoscode you wrote pretty solid advice there. I think I can start looking into the BitTorrent protocol and go from there. Maybe start with some sort of Limewire clone and go from there?

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  • fabiosantoscodefabiosantoscode@mastodon.social
    Sep 8, 2026, 3:08 PM

    @maxalmonte14 I don't know much about P2P honestly. I prefer federated structures because I think they're more resilient and easier to reason about.

    For the federated server I think you could run the tracker on the same server as the API/web server (trackers are HTTP right? Or am I mixing it up with webtorrent trackers?)

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  • fabiosantoscodefabiosantoscode@mastodon.social
    Sep 8, 2026, 3:09 PM

    @maxalmonte14 I think the major challenge is the human element. Moderation, being able to take down illegal or extremely objectionable content, things like that.

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  • Charlotte Atencaten@mathstodon.xyz
    Sep 7, 2026, 9:03 PM

    @maxalmonte14 I'm thinking you mentioned the name #PeerTube because you've seen it, but it's not really P2P. I believe #ZeroNet had something like this. At least they had a fully P2P torrent site like the Pirate Bay, through which you can of course share movies.

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  • Max Almontemaxalmonte14
    Sep 8, 2026, 1:46 PM

    @caten I was trying to be funny when I mentioned Peertube, since the name might lead people to wrongly believe it works like what I described, when it's really federated.

    I've seen sites/apps that use the bittorrent protocol to let users stream movies in the past, Popcorn Time comes to mind; just wondering if the same principle can be applied to original video sharing.

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  • oniononion@night.studio-2am.net
    Sep 7, 2026, 10:57 PM
    So if there are 100 users each sharing 1gb of video, would that mean each of the other 99 would eventually have that video locally so it can stream it too? In other words wouldn’t the required space grow exponentially with users and offered material?
    Not sure if I got that right…

    @maxalmonte14@indiehackers.social
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  • Max Almontemaxalmonte14
    Sep 8, 2026, 1:51 PM

    @onion that scenario would be possible provided that every single user watches every single video on the network, which is unlikely. Since videos are only downloaded when you watch, most users would only have a subset of them locally. Some sort of caching and expiring policies will be needed to avoid filling your hard disk drive with other people's videos, of course.

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  • Nanjizalnanjizal@peoplemaking.games
    Sep 8, 2026, 7:12 PM

    @maxalmonte14
    flash used to allow peer2peer, you could use it with a server or direct between people. I have one of my old tutorials you can see on wayback
    web.archive.org/web/2021012203
    I think it may have inspired someone from pirates bay to create zero copy c++ to use it over neko tora, for video poker while hiding in asia, but not really a backend person. So the idea is probably not new but always useful. But not tried p2p since flash.
    Cumulus is now mono server?
    github.com/MonaSolutions/MonaS

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