Usually it shows around 1-2 peers on the player when I watch videos on PeerTube. I just watched a video that had up to 20 peers.
Here are the stats
Total downloaded: 1.5 GB
* From servers: 149 MB
* From peers: 1.3 GB
Total uploaded: 618 MB
I left the video open while writing this text an now I uploaded a total of 1.0 GB.
Nice to see PeerTube in action in a real peer to peer way.
Oh wow I did not realise peertube was like torrenting almost! That is so cool :)
Peer to peer, hence the name. :)
Considering how often people try to retort “BuT WhAt aBoUt tHe bAnDwIdTh cOsTs” whenever it’s mentioned as a YouTube alternative, it seems like almost nobody realizes that.
Yeah. Because if it was hosted the same way lemmy is (with storage of posts across all servers once they federate) it would be a storage and bandwidth nightmare.
IIRC, they used some torrent codebase. It’s like a closed tracker.
In the blog post for PeerTube v6, it says:
We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
So, I guess, they use a more custom implementation now…
TIL, thanks!
It’s really awesome and it’s also possible to setup your PeerTube instance as a peer, for another PeerTube instance’s videos.
You can see here:
The instance videos.abnormalbeings.space has a copy of the video 17 New Indie Games – June 2025, that’s hosted on PeerTube.wtf.
So when you go to the video, you’ll see it has at least 2 peers - peertube.wtf + videos.abnormalbeings.space.
I’ve never seen any stats while watching on a browser or the iOS app. Where did you get those numbers?
On a browser the stats are hidden behind the text “1 peer” on the bottom right of the player, next to the volume icon. When you hover over “1 peer” the stats will appear.
Haven’t seen this in the android app either.
Oh that’s true. When I watch something from the featured channels (i.e. something everyone else cares about, but I have zero interest in), there’s an upload download counter etc. However, when I watch something that I actually want to click, I see none of that.
Ah, are these the local stats for your computer traffic? Or is it a total for that particular video?
Those are local stats
Er, yikes, over how much time?
Is your bandwidth uncapped?
You can disable the P2P feature.
This is for a 15 minute long video. I have unlimited bandwidth.
A lot of residential plans where I live only cap the downloads.
The hell? That’s fucked up…
I mean they probably throttle upload to 1/10th the bandwidth as download…
Ding ding ding!
