Your own video platform with PeerTube
PeerTube is free software for running a video platform of your own: on your domain, under your name, with your rules. It is developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit, and licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. A PeerTube platform can stand alone, or connect to other PeerTube platforms and to Mastodon through the open ActivityPub standard, so people can follow your channels without joining your site. This article explains how it works, what you can do with it and what it takes to run.
Why run your own video platform
A channel on a large video platform is a tenancy. The platform decides how videos are ranked and recommended, which adverts run beside them, what data is collected about your viewers and whether a video stays up. For a school, a church, a training company, a council or any organisation with its own audience, a platform of its own means:
- videos on your own domain, in your own design
- rules you set and moderate yourself
- viewers who can watch without an account, with no advertising
- recordings you keep, in a place you control
How PeerTube connects to the wider network
Every PeerTube platform, called an instance, can choose which other instances to follow and which may follow it. Followed instances show each other's videos, so a small platform can offer a much larger catalogue. Because PeerTube speaks ActivityPub, a W3C Recommendation since 2018, people on Mastodon and other compatible services can follow a PeerTube channel and comment on its videos from their own accounts.
Instances can also mirror one another's videos to share the load, and the administrator decides whether nobody, only followed instances or anybody may do so. Federation can be switched off entirely for a private platform.
How it streams to many viewers
PeerTube streams with HLS, the adaptive format that adjusts the quality to the viewer's connection. It can also share video between viewers watching at the same time: each viewer's browser passes pieces of the video to others, which takes load off the server when many people watch at once.
That peer-to-peer sharing has a privacy trade-off. While it is on, a viewer's IP address is visible to the platform's tracker and to the other viewers they share with. The administrator can switch it off for the whole platform, and viewers can switch it off for themselves. With peer-to-peer sharing off and no extra plugins, core PeerTube sends no personal data to third parties.
What you can run on it
- Channels and playlists. Each account can run several channels, each with its own banner, avatar and a Support button that links wherever you choose.
- Privacy levels. Videos can be public, unlisted, password-protected, internal to your platform, or private.
- Live streams. Stream from OBS or any RTMP software, with a replay kept afterwards, and permanent lives that keep the same address for a weekly service or class.
- Simple editing. Cut a video, add a watermark, an intro or an outro in PeerTube's studio.
- Channel sync. Keep a PeerTube channel in step with an existing YouTube or Vimeo channel.
- Your brand. Set the logo, icon, banner, colours and homepage, add custom styles, and choose from more than fifty published themes.
- Plugins. More than 180 published plugins add features such as single sign-on, CAPTCHA and analytics.
Moderation and control
The administrator decides who can upload: registration can be closed, open, or open with approval. New uploads can be held in quarantine until a moderator approves them, and trusted users can skip the queue. Moderators handle reports from viewers, can block videos, mute accounts or whole instances, and can set word lists that hold back videos or comments containing them. PeerTube is your platform, under your rules and the law where you operate.
What it takes to run
PeerTube is a Node.js application with a PostgreSQL database, Redis and ffmpeg for video processing, behind nginx. It can be installed from its own guide on Debian or Ubuntu, or with its official Docker Compose set-up. Three things shape the server:
- Bandwidth. Video is heavy. PeerTube's own example: a 1 Gbit/s connection serving 1080p video at 5 Mbit/s a stream reaches at most about 200 simultaneous viewers, before peer-to-peer sharing helps.
- Transcoding. Every upload is converted into several resolutions, which uses a lot of processor time. Its FAQ suggests 4 cores and 4 GB of memory for around a thousand concurrent viewers, and 8 cores and 8 GB if transcoding runs on the same machine. Transcoding can also be handed to separate runner machines.
- Storage. Each resolution is a separate file. When the library grows, PeerTube can store videos in any S3-compatible object storage.
PeerTube releases about four major versions a year and supports only the latest stable release, so it needs regular upgrades. Framasoft also holds the PeerTube trademark and asks each platform to use a name of its own.
PeerTube with Noiz
You can run PeerTube yourself on a Noiz Cloud server, a self-managed Ubuntu or Debian server with full root access, following PeerTube's installation guide. Our knowledgebase covers upgrading PeerTube.
If you have questions about running a video platform of your own, get in touch.
Sources
Checked 19 October 2026.
PeerTube
- joinpeertube.org FAQ
- Licence and release v8.3.1
- ActivityPub in PeerTube and following instances
- Configuration and privacy guide
- Remote runners and remote storage
- Customising an instance and plugins and themes
- Moderation and managing users
- Dependencies, installation and Docker
Standards
Noiz
Note: while some of this content was produced with the help of AI, the final editing has been done by a real human being.
