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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Reddit = Text based platform. Text: 1 Character = 1 Byte
Migration Difficulty: Easier than curing my depression
Youtube = Video based platform. Videos: [Error, Not Enough Storage] (Also bandwidth)
Migration Difficulty: Maybe try your luck at winning the lottery instead (and if you win, you can spend the money hosting a Peertube Instance)
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There are problems with PeerTube but everyone jumps to bandwidth and storage, yet they’re the things that PeerTube has solutions for.
The issues I’ve seen are hurdles in federating because of many undesirable instances/content (somewhat fixed by community whitelists) and privacy since p2p exposes IP addresses.
Otherwise PeerTube is super interesting to me as a platform with a lot of potential.
One of the areas where YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/Twitch really excel, compared to things like PeerTube, is storing a shitload of file formats with all the different options of resolution/quality and codec. When a user uploads a supported file, YouTube automatically generates files containing h.264 video in mp4 containers at several different resolutions/bandwidth/quality settings, and then processes the more popularly viewed videos into more bandwidth-efficient codecs, like VP9 or AV1 (at the cost of much more processing/server load, which is why they only do this for videos that reach a particular threshold of views).
Then, when someone views a video, it seamlessly sends the "best" video for that person's resources and supported codecs, including stepping up or down in quality mid-stream based on the performance of that connection.
Decentralization of these functions is a complex task, because not everyone will have the right hardware to do these things efficiently. Intel, AMD, and Apple CPUs support different hardware acceleration for video encoding or decoding, while Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple have different GPU support, too. So transcoding and related functionality tends to be much more device-dependent. It's not an insumountable problem, but in the meantime we'll just basically live with less efficient quality-per-bandwidth settings on PeerTube videos. So that'll exacerbate the cost of storage and bandwidth (or the quality) in a service that relies on user-donated storage and bandwidth.