Extending PeerTube

PeerTube in practice: an interview with Beeld & Geluid

PeerTube in de praktijk: een interview met Beeld & Geluid

PublicSpaces, 21 November 2024

Mediamuseum Beeld & Geluid is a PeerTube forerunner. We interviewed our coalition partner about the video platform.

For three years now, Mediamuseum Beeld & Geluid has been publishing videos on PeerTube and there is now an enormous archive of video material to be found there. As a coalition partner of PublicSpaces, the museum is part of the recently started PeerTube Spaces project in which we set up and test PeerTube servers with pilot partners. Beeld & Geluid is an important source of knowledge in this; knowledge that Frank Sträter, ICT engineer at Beeld & Geluid, is already willing to share with us in an interview.

Hey Frank. When and how did you switch to PeerTube?

As an audiovisual archive, we were interested in PeerTube early on from the PublicSpaces initiative. Around the launch of PeerTube 1.0 at the end of 2018, we started investigating whether PeerTube could be useful as a publicly accessible platform for open content.

Since 2021, we have gone live with our PeerTube instance as a showcase of our project ‘Extending PeerTube’. This project aimed to extend PeerTube to support the availability, accessibility and findability of large-scale public media collections.

By importing the content (video + metadata) from the existing platform openbeelden.nl, we launched our PeerTube platform with more than 7000 videos.

You are truly a pioneer. Why the brave choice for the not so well-known PeerTube?

At Beeld & Geluid we have set up our own video hosting websites in the past, but they were quite expensive to maintain and modernize where necessary over the years. We saw potential in PeerTube to serve as a basis for future similar use.

In our opinion, the decentralized federation model of PeerTube (and other ActivityPub platforms such as Mastodon) also ties in with the mission of the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (NDE), which facilitates and stimulates knowledge sharing and collaboration in the cultural sector.

What kind of videos do you put on PeerTube?

Beeld & Geluid does not make many videos itself and is mainly the caretaker of digitized audiovisual material in our archive. We only put videos on PeerTube that are royalty-free and that we are allowed to republish.

What is the purpose of the Beeld & Geluid videos on PeerTube? Is it a way of archiving or are there more goals behind it? For example, do you want to reach an audience or make the material easier to share?

In general, the goal is to show the public what is stored in our archive. Making it available online gives the public an accessible way to get to know our archive. With the material on PeerTube, we also reach a wider audience and stimulate creative reuse.

This reuse has to do with the creative commons license under which the videos are placed. What does that entail and why did you choose it?

Creative Commons (CC) is an originally American project for promoting open content. Its goal is to make creative works more freely available than is possible with traditional copyright, for example so that these works can be copied and distributed more easily or that others can continue to work on them. Creative Commons offers various free licenses that copyright holders can use to prevent problems that can arise due to current copyright legislation when distributing information.

For us, the Creative Commons licenses or the Public Domain marking are the only way to republish material from our archive free of restrictions for the general public.

How do you like the moderation on your server? Do you have a lot of work to do?

Moderation with PeerTube involves 2 things. Firstly, the moderation of video content and therefore assessing whether the videos that are uploaded meet the conditions of use of the platform and thus responding if a user objects to published videos. In addition, we have moderation of video comments: assessing comments on videos that can be posted by viewers.

On our server, we do not have an open sign-up and our users who upload videos adhere to the agreements about what is allowed in terms of content. In the beginning, we chose not to allow comments because we were concerned that it would be too much work. PeerTube has now been further developed as a platform and it is a lot easier to limit moderation work (comment spam was a problem for a long time).

Due to the mainly historical nature of our videos, we do not think we will get many comments, so it might be a good idea to turn it on for all videos. In any case, we do not expect a lot of work.

You host your PeerTube server yourself. How much time did you spend setting up the server and how much time do you spend on it now? What kind of tasks are involved?

Setting up a server is not that difficult and can be done in one day. Most of the time is spent on configuration and especially adding content. In the beginning, we were still actively improving PeerTube itself (bug fixing, testing, documentation), but PeerTube is now so stable and feature complete that we spend little time on it. The only task that remains is installing an update when there is a new release. The costs (time and money) are therefore currently zero.

With PeerTube you can federate content between your own server and that of others. How does B&G deal with this? What have you learned from this?

Federating with another server works best if you have thematically the same content and each other’s videos do not look out of place. From the beginning and due to the lack of other (mainly Dutch-language) instances with historical footage, we have mainly federated to other instances, so one-way traffic, in which our videos could be seen on other instances, but which themselves hardly contained any interesting videos. We no longer do that, because the context of our videos (mainly Dutch-language historical footage) was missing on other institutions.

You use different video platforms. YouTube, your own platform related to DAAN (Digital Audiovisual Archive of the Netherlands), PeerTube. How do these relate to each other? When is which platform chosen?

DAAN is our primary platform for our entire archive and is mainly intended for ordering AV material, but is not royalty-free and is intended for media professionals and individuals who purchase a license for use. YouTube is more comparable to PeerTube, but mainly for playing content and serves more to promote our collection. You will also find fragments of videos compiled by the web editors. PeerTube makes it possible to legally download and reuse an integral copy (mp4) in addition to playing it under the condition of the Creative Commons license.

What are the pitfalls in setting up and using PeerTube?

Don’t expect too much from the reach of your organization as a website. The public does not come to your “website” to watch videos for an evening. The number of views of a video is mainly of qualitative value (low number, high interest) and the appreciation will not be expressed often (likes, comments, etc.). Bring the videos themselves to your audience by embedding them in an article or sharing them via social media, especially if you are already present as an organization on Mastodon. You only need a few people who believe in the future of PeerTube and enjoy investing time and effort in it and have a mandate from your organization to make it your own success.

Would you recommend PeerTube to other organizations?

Yes, we would definitely recommend trying it once; even if you only have a few videos or you already have all your videos on YouTube. It has become so easy to start a channel on an open instance or run a temporary hosted PeerTube for low costs. You can even import your entire YouTube channel without any technical knowledge and have both exist synchronously for a while.

PeerTube has developed very quickly and has become more stable and versatile at a rapid pace. Depending on what kind of audiovisual material you have to offer, there are also other alternatives emerging within the “Fediverse” (ActivityPub based platforms), such as Loops as an alternative to TikTok.

PeerTube extended

This article describes the Extending PeerTube project which was executed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in the context of the PublicSpaces initiative. This project was funded through the NGI Zero Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 82532.2

What is the project about?

Extending Peertube aims to extend PeerTube to support the availability, accessibility, and discoverability of large-scale public media collections on the next generation internet.

As a national audiovisual heritage institute, we share thousands of collection items as open video content, which is free and open for everyone to reuse. In the past we’ve developed a custom solution to distribute this content, according to these open principles: openimages.eu

Since, our custom solution has aged, while we see that sister organisations and partners in our international network have similar requirements to what we seek: open source technology, state-of-the-art video distribution and play-out and the ability to self host.

In this project we extend the open source video platform PeerTube to fit our use case, while sharing our code and insight upstream, for other users with a similar use case to also benefit from our efforts. All this to contribute to a vibrant open video sharing ecosystem.

All this fits with our long term vision to federate multiple large scale open video collections to build an international community to share and reuse our audiovisual heritage on the next generation internet.

What problem does your project solve?

Although PeerTube is technically capable of supporting the distribution of large public media collections, the platform currently lacks practical examples and extensive documentation to achieve this in a timely and cost-efficient way. This project will function as a proof-of-concept that will showcase several compelling improvements to the PeerTube software by:

• developing and demonstrating the means needed for this end by migrating a large corpus of open video content
• implementing trustworthy open licensing metadata standards for video publication through PeerTube
• emphasizing the importance of accompanying subtitle files by recommending ways to generate them

Migration

Since the original aim of PeerTube was to provide an alternative solution to YouTube as the dominant video sharing platform, it is optimized for the single user who wants to periodically upload their user generated content and share this as a single video within their own channel. Since our use case involves migrating multiple thousands of videos to a PeerTube instance, we worked on a toolkit and instructions to programmatically import large numbers of videos from a legacy video platform to PeerTube:

https://beeldengeluid.github.io/extending-peertube/category/migration.html

This also included instructions on implementing URL redirection in PeerTube, after migrating from a large video streaming platform:

https://beeldengeluid.github.io/extending-peertube/category/url-redirection.html

Creative Commons

In the cultural heritage domain, the standard for free and open sharing of resources on the web has been Creative Commons licenses for over a decade now. Although PeerTube already implemented an option for their users to attribute a ‘license’ to their contributions to a PeerTube instance, this solution wasn’t (fully) compliant with Creative Commons.

As Sound and Vision values transparent and legally sound communication about the extent to which the collection items it shares on the web can be shared and reused by the public, it took upon itself the task of developing a Creative Commons compliant licensing plugin for PeerTube.

This plugin extends PeerTube with the needed user interface elements to select and display the licenses, but also inserts the correct micro formats into the video item page, making the license also machine readable:

https://beeldengeluid.github.io/extending-peertube/category/cc-plugin.html

Subtitling

The final strand of work in the project looked at improving the accessibility and discoverability of videos within large collections hosted on a PeerTube instance. It provided a guide on using the PeerTube API to - at scale - add subtitles to an instance, and also suggested ways for existing video content to be enriched with subtitles, using open source Automatic Speech Recognition software:

https://beeldengeluid.github.io/extending-peertube/category/subtitles.html

For more information

We documented our progress here on this website and published our tools at:

https://github.com/beeldengeluid/extending-peertube/

Sound and Vision runs a self-hosted PeerTube instance at:

https://peertube.beeldengeluid.nl

The Creative Commons plugin for PeerTube is maintained in a separate repository at:

https://github.com/beeldengeluid/peertube-plugin-creative-commons

and published on NPM:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/peertube-plugin-creative-commons

URL redirection in PeerTube

With a setup for redirecting a lot of URLs in Nginx by creating several configuration files, in this article we will recommend how to integrate these files in an existing Nginx HTTP server and specifically in PeerTube, which only supports Nginx as a reverse proxy for performance and security.

The reverse proxy will receive client HTTP requests, and:

• Proxy them to the API server
• Serve requested static files (Video files, stylesheets, javascript, fonts…)

So we extend this with another functionality:

• redirect old URls from a video website to the PeerTube URLs

URL mapping with Nginx

Nginx’s map module lets you create variables in Nginx’s configuration file whose values are conditional — that is, they depend on other variables’ values. In this guide, we will look at how to use Nginx’s map module to implement redirects from old website URLs to new ones.

URL redirection on the server

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened.

URL redirection is done for various reasons:

• for URL shortening;
• to prevent broken links when web pages are moved;
• to allow multiple domain names belonging to the same owner to refer to a single web site;
• to guide navigation into and out of a website;
• for privacy protection; and
• for hostile purposes such as phishing attacks or malware distribution.

from Wikipedia: URL redirection

In our case we focus on the second reason: to prevent broken links after migrating a video streaming website to PeerTube.