Unusably Slow Playback on Peertube??

[tshirt-chihuahu]

@subven @girish An alternative suggestion to disabling by default: calling this setting out in the cloudron app documentation. ( I'm kind of surprised this hadn't come up in the forum yet.)

[jdaviescoates]

Hmm, interesting, I don't think I ever edited any config to turn any p2p or federation stuff off.

[girish]

Thing is we don't generally touch upstream defaults - https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/config/default.yaml#L282 and https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/config/production.yaml.example#L280 .

I will put this in our docs.

[girish]

Added a note in https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/peertube/#disable-p2p

[subven]

@girish said in Unusably Slow Playback on Peertube??:

Thing is we don't generally touch upstream defaults

Thats a fair position. Though, I have installed a fresh peertube on my private Cloudron server, gave it enough ressources and was able to reproduce the problem. Normal playback is not possible out of the box and the P2P Webtorrent functionality seems to be the culpid. P2P works within your browser and my public (client/browser) IP is displayed correctly but I still think it has something to do with the way Cloudrons setup works.

Since I as a user assume that every app in the Cloudron store works without further configuration, I see a problem here. I wonder why this wasn't noticed earlier, since the P2P defaults have been in peertube for over 3 1/2 years and the app is not new at Cloudron. To make my point: Just because it works upstream as a default, does not necessarily mean it works for us ^^

[jdaviescoates]

@subven said in Unusably Slow Playback on Peertube??:

@girish said in Unusably Slow Playback on Peertube??:

Thing is we don't generally touch upstream defaults

Thats a fair position. Though, I have installed a fresh peertube on my private Cloudron server, gave it enough ressources and was able to reproduce the problem. Normal playback is not possible out of the box and the P2P functionality seems to be the culpid. P2P works within your browser and my public (client/browser) IP is displayed correctly but I still think it has something to do with the way Cloudrons setup works.

Since I as a user assume that every app in the Cloudron store works without further configuration, I see a problem here. I wonder why this wasn't noticed earlier, since the P2P defaults have been in peertube for over 3 1/2 years and the app is not new at Cloudron. To make my point: Just because it works upstream as a default, does not necessarily mean it works for us ^^

I wonder why I haven't hit this issue then? Pretty sure I've not done anything to turn P2P stuff off on https://video.uniteddiversity.coop

[subven]

@jdaviescoates said in Unusably Slow Playback on Peertube??:

I wonder why I haven't hit this issue then?

P2P and Webtorrent is on by default. If I open up your video it plays nice even if it does not have direct/instant download speed but you seem to have Webtorrent disabled and use HLS instead. Try something with more bitrate like a 4K or FullHD file with 10-25mbit. Does it still work well? (I would assume yes)

There are different player modes depending on the P2P/Webtorrent/HLS settings (right click a playing video and choose stats for nerds to see player modes):

Player-Mode: HTTP
P2P: deactivated
--> Plays instant and nice but does not follow the approach of Peertube because of no P2P. This is what I considered as a workaround or "stable" default but it is not really desirable.

Player-Mode: p2p-media-loader
P2P: activated (or disabled in some cases?)
--> @jdaviescoates this is what your instance does. Seems to work and supports P2P so if there are no other peers, the video is downloaded just from your server. This should work for everyone and I would consider it as a good default option.

Player-Mode: webtorrent
P2P: activated
--> This is the default configuration and it does not work well. Slow download and unplayable. There is also a difference if you're logged in or not. I opened a video in 5 different browser windows --> got 5 peers --> video started to download/play nicer for "everyone" but still really slow. Without another peer connected, the download is terrible (20-150kbs) so the feature works but heavily relies on federation and multiple peers which is not suitable for starters or stand alone instances.

Explanation at the offical documentation about webtorrent/HLS streaming.

You can find the UI configuration for the features here:

I would recommend to turn webtorrent off unless you have a huge federation and a lot of peers. Not sure if it would be okay to enable HFS as default since it requires ffmpeg but it is recommended.

@girish I think the docs (Disable P2P) should be adjusted since we now know that it is webtorrent and not P2P (also possible through WebRTC) in general. You can turn off webtorrent within the UI but you need to restart the app afterwards (or at least it did not switch instantly for me). The biggest problem with webtorrent on as default is that files that were uploaded with "webtorrent on / HLS off" still are "unplayable" after switching the settings. They need to be reencoded and I'm not sure if this triggers automacially or at all. I tested the behavior with two files and different settings enabled.

Another hurdle: From this point, all the following keys can be overridden by the web interface ~~ the modification of the following keys will have no effect starts at L360 in the example yaml. However in my production.yaml (Cloudron app) it is at L162 so you could end up doing configuration that gets ignored.

[tshirt-chihuahu]

@subven thanks a lot for helping us get to the bottom of this.

The webtorrent selection UI in the settings is a bit odd (and the peertube documentation has no search functionality), so your writeup should hopefully help any future travelers figure it out.

I was able to find the the relevant section in the Peertube Docs now that explains these options a bit. HLS is actually the recommended setting by them as well:

We recommend you to enable HLS (and disable WebTorrent if you don't want to store 2 different versions of the same video resolution) because video playback is really better

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin-configuration?id=webtorrent-transcoding-or-hls-transcoding

[girish]

@subven Oh, I forgot to act on your suggestion. I will go ahead and disable webtorrent in the next package release.

[tshirt-chihuahu]

Also, for those that don't know what HLS is (I didn't prior to running into this issue), here's a link to get you started with "HTTP Live Streaming":

**Adaptability **
To enable a player to adapt to the bandwidth of the network, the original video is encoded in several distinct quality levels. The server serves an index, called a "master playlist", of these encodings, called "variant streams". The player can then choose between the variant streams during playback, changing back and forth seamlessly as network conditions change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Adaptability