What PeerTube is BT based
Yes it is. But it seems like they try to hide it from the user for some reason. This is the process for getting a .torrent file from PeerTube. When on the video page, click on the three dots, then click on Download and select torrent file instead of direct download. You’ll get a download link like this: https://tilvids.com/download/torrents/3869f4ed-ba37-42a9-9876-22ed8f364a9a-1080-hls.torrent
This is the torrent for this video btw: https://tilvids.com/w/dAeCyhu6MArtNvm6iCQD9D
I think they should make the torrent option much more prominent, and also add support for Magnet links, which are easier and more convenient to share than .torrent files.
can you just seed the normal torrent files to help
As far as I know, yes.
When you watch a video using the PeerTube web UI, you can see the number of peers in the bottom right corner, next to the fullscreen button. If you hover over it, you see how much you streamed from the PeerTube server, and how much from peers. Apparently the PeerTube web UI also acts as a torrent seed (presumably using WebTorrent), but it never worked for me (probably because my browser is always behind a VPN).
Unfortunately WebTorrent isn’t compatible with normal BitTorrent, so unless you’re using a client that specifically supports it, you’re not helping out any PeerTube clients
Oh I didn’t realize that it’s a different protocol. I thought WebTorrent was just an implementation of BT that could run in the browser. PeerTube uses normal BitTorrent though.
You can’t do normal BitTorrent in browsers, there’s no support for plain sockets that you’d need to communicate with other peers, WebTorrent is technically a new protocol that implements the BT semantics over stuff the browsers do provide (So you can proxy between the different swarms, that’s the “hybrid” nodes in the image on the WebTorrent page)
But it turns out it’s all a moot point, since PeerTube removed WebTorrent support anyway in favour of their own P2P system
Edit: Ok so I misunderstood, and it seems like it’s a bit complicated. The server can (it’s disabled by default) use WebTorrent to import videos, the client still uses the WT trackers to find peers but uses a different protocol to actually share the video data.
There’s this tool that provides the ability to automatically seed videos, but development has stalled because no up to date client will ever make use of it.
I think the one remaining use is the “download as torrent” option, but even then that’s just using a web seed, so it’s just an alternative way to download the video.
