Pixelfed now also supports WebP2P videos like Peertube
Pixelfed now also supports WebP2P videos like Peertube
✨ Hello WebP2P! Admins can now enable WebP2P support for Video! This allows you to distribute and cache videos among users, reducing the load on the origin and accelerating content delivery! Big thanks to the pioneering work of @peertube@framapiaf.org and the funding by @NGIZero@mastodon.xyz ht...
Very nice improvement and I hope more fediverse software starts supporting this. tl;dr popular videos are also uploaded by the viewers, thus lowering the server load, similar to Bittorrent, but all in the browser.
pixelfed seems to be getting some really nice improvements at an incredible rate. Props to those devs!
ELI5?
Like Peertube, videos shared on Pixelfed are now (optionally) WebP2P enabled, meaning that all users currently watching the video contribute to sharing the video by sending small parts of it to other users via a P2P connection similar to Bittorrent. This helps the server a lot as it only has to send the parts no other viewer can send. This is important when videos are very popular and watched by many people the same time, which would normally overload the server (unless you are Google and have datacenters for Youtube all over the world).
Neat!
That's cool but are the videos on Pixelfed long enough for WebP2P to work? I imagine the median video length on Pixelfed would be seconds rather than minutes as it would be on Peertube.