Cross-posted from “If you could improve PeerTube, what would you improve?” by @asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev in !asklemmy@lemmy.world
What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
So many things:
- A closed caption system like youtube. I’m deaf so 90% of peertube videos are just unwatchable to me.
- A working mobile app.
- An easy guide to instances that is clear on which instances are mainly local vids and which basically federate with everything. Ideally, a couple, lemmy.world, lemm.ee style peertube instances that are general purpose and kind of have everything I can direct people who want to join too.
- A non-personalised algorithm. Ie. recommend similar high rated videos.
You are probably already aware but YouTube’s closed captions are very inaccurate. I’m sure it’s better than nothing though.
Yes it very much depends the video. But on slow paced standard english they tend to be okay, which is most the content I end up watching anyways.
Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms
Admins are able to add external search engines. Most use sepia search and it pretty much covers all the non-sketchy stuff.
Some kind of Monetary-support system
Maybe Liberapay built-in? I’m sure a plugin could fix that.
I wish there was a libre one-time payment software
Liberapay is centralized but it is open source.
But it uses Stripe & Paypal
It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There’s a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.
The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.
A custom bubble time-line like Akkoma has would be nice for Peertube indeed.
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It’s mainly finding videos for me. I’ve been able to find a few interesting ones, but largely it’s either difficult to find, or not there at all. I myself have actually been considering making some videos to help the content drought, but then the ideas, or knowledge of what people could be receptive to doesn’t quite come.
also as a newpipe user, being able to search all of my selected instances at once, or with sepiasearch could be nice, but thats not up to peertube
Better algorithm and a better incentive to post content (im not sure what, maybe donations)
Better federation with eachother, a way for monetisation.
It’s surprising that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way in the UI to just see a list of creators/channels on a local instance. So, that’s the first thing I’d change to improve discoverability.
The way I currently find relevant content is by going to Sepia Search, putting in exact words that I think are likely to be in the title of at least one video on a channel that would likely also have a lot of other relevant content, and then going through that channel’s playlists. Those searches often lead me to single user instances with only one or two channels (e.g. a channel that has a backup of that user’s YouTube content and a channel with a backup of their Twitch or OwnCast or whatever streams). When it leads me to a generalist instance or one with a relevant subject/theme though, I’ve had little luck finding content from anyone else unless they’ve posted recently (compared to other users). Often the content that is most relevant to me is not what is newest but the archives from years ago. (New content is relevant though once I want to follow someone in particular, but it’s not what I want to see first.)
Another issue I’ve encountered is with the behavior of downloaded videos. I greatly appreciate that PeerTube provides a URL for direct download, and I prefer to watch videos in my own player downloaded in advance (so I can watch offline; pause and resume trivially after putting my computer to sleep; etc). H264 MP4 works fine for this, but the download seems to be some sort of chunked variant of it (for HLS?) which requires the player to read in the entire file to figure out the length or seek accurately. Having to wait a minute or two to be able to seek each time I open a large video file off my HDD is an irritating papercut. I suspect there’s likely a way to fix it by including an index in the file (or in a sidecar file) but I don’t know how to do it – short of re-encoding the entire video again which I’d rather not do since it both takes a long time and can result in quality loss. This usually doesn’t affect newly added videos (where the download link includes the pattern
/download/web-videos
and a warning is shown that it’s still being transcoded) but does when that’s done (the URL includes/download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos
instead); so, this is something that happens as a result of PeerTube’s reprocessing.Downloads from the instances that I’ve found to be most relevant to me are also pretty unreliable (connection is slow and drops a lot), so I use wget with automatic retries (and it sometimes still needs manual retries…) rather than downloading through my browser which tends to fail and then often annoyingly start over completely if I request a retry… It would be really nice if I could check that I’ve downloaded the file correctly and completely with a sha256 hash or something.
Search on all these federated sites is terrible. We need several user-selectable algorithms that display feeds from all instances
Better federation. The vidiverse search is just bad, i want to watch all types of content from my account.
And more general instances; i’m on spectra.video now, but as i said the vidiverse search sucks and it’s not federated to enough instances :/
There’s Sepia Search, but I don’t really understand why that’s not just built into the Peertube UI itself.
Yeah :/ in some instances it is, but it’s usually broken.
I especially wish i could actually interact with those videos from my account, such as liking or commenting. There are three types of instances: no sign ups, outdated or no content on them.
Better federation and search. Make it easier for content creators and instance runners to monetize. Make it easier to script your own feed/recommendations.
All of the above is true for all software on the fediverse. But monetization especially for PeerTube. Pay to watch, donations and ads should all be options in the official implementation. Because of the high cost of running a large high bandwidth instance (if that wasn’t obvious).
Seems like the only ones who really benefit from PeerTube right now are right-wing extremists. The only large Swedish instances are far-right. And they are big because of content supply and demand.
What’s peer tube?
Is the P2P component what makes or breaks this platform? It sounds like this is key to its success.
Are PT hosts also part of the P2P network? I could see hosting costs increase dramatically as a result of hosting popular content.
Multiple audio tracks for different languages.
Automatic subtitles. I know… Not the easiest functionality to develop but I do miss it from Youtube.
VLC is adding AI generated subtitles, I wonder if it would be possible to co-opt that?
That would be nice.
More content. We need 100% of the Creative Commons videos on YouTube to be mirrored, to start
We had vidcommons.org once, that hosted a lot of CC content. Unfortunately the owner couldn’t afford to keep it running.
If you now a source of CC videos, let me know.
Import/export subscriptions