Peertube Video Roundup

Posted: October 17, 2021

Peertube is an open source, decentralized, federated alternative to youtube and twitch. You can upload videos to any peertube instance, and subscribe to accounts from most other instances. You can also live stream. This is really cool, and a great place to find some DIY Media.

I’ve talked enough about DIY media, I won’t rehash it all here.

Peertube is not without issues, moderation is hard on a video sharing site, storage and bandwidth are still expensive, Instances (even the big ones) go down, and sometimes don’t come back up. Frankly, I’ll deal with all of that to avoid depending on a major corporation’s good will to share video content.

The biggest problem facing peertube, though, is content discovery.

So I’m going to do my part and round up some of my favorite peertube videos that I’ve seen in the last month or so. Not all of these are recent uploads, just stuff I came (back?) across in the last few weeks. I’m also going to include some of my uploads, because I want to draw more attention to them.

All links point to our peertube instance, but the content is federated and can be found elsewhere. Our instance is not currently accepting new members, but feel free to reach out to me if you’d like a peertube account and can’t find an instance that seems right for you. It’s also worth noting that peertube is built entirely on open tech. Every video can be downloaded from the page (click the elipse menu and choose download), and every user and channel can be subscribed to over RSS/ATOM. It uses WebRTC to reduce bandwidth utilization on popular videos by sharing browser to browser, viewer to viewer, and is just generally really cool.

Other people’s stuff

BlitzCityDIY

Lots of great build videos and synth jams. My favorites are the Oskitone Scount Synth, This could have been a stab wound, and press the button, but frankly this is a great channel.

Emily’s Oddities

Emily is one of the best video creators I’ve found on peertube. Her channel is a combination of project builds (like this excellent Optical Sound Decoder or this arduino ascii printer) and music (like this found sound piece!)

Add her to your feed reader.

Data Kerfuffle

This video answers the question “What if Infowars was Australian?” I’m not sure why that question was asked, or why it needed to be answered, but it made me laugh.

Sita Sings the Blues

Uploaded by Vidcommons Film Sita Sings the Blues is a creative commons licensed, 2008 American animated musical romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, produced and animated by American artist Nina Paley. It intersperses events from the Ramayana, light-hearted but knowledgeable discussion of historical background by a trio of Indian shadow puppets, musical interludes voiced with tracks by Annette Hanshaw and scenes from the artist’s own life. The ancient mythological and modern biographical plot are parallel tales, sharing numerous themes.

(at the time of upload, vidcommons was displaying this message: VidCommons is in the process of migrating over all of its media to new and better storage. Some videos will not play correctly at the moment - our team is working through it!)

Vampyr

Also uploaded by vidcommons film, Vampyr is a 1931 horror film written and directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, and inspired by Through a Glass Darkly. Vampyr is Dreyer’s first Sound Film, and carries with it many of the motifs of early silent films. I reviewed it in 2019

Anarch

Demo of an anticapitalist, public domain, FPS.

Mirrorshades

Purveyor of bizarre video and audio oddities, like a grindhouse remake of Star Wars, or this 1980 Special Report on computers produced by a Wisconsin news crew, or the BBC’s 2 hour audio adaptation of Neuromancer.

Excerpt from Jack Kelly’s ‘The Edge of Anarchy.’

Just Ethan reading to camera, but worth hearing.

DIY injection molding (part one)

What it says on the tin.

Chroma.VGM

Video Game Music.

My Stuff

You can find my account at ajroach42@mountaintown.video. I upload new content about once a week or so.

Teenagers from Outer Space (the silent film)

This is a silent remix of Teenagers from Outer Space. It’s a fun, silly experiment in filmmaking.

The original movie is uploaded elsewhere on this instance and on the internet archive.

Edit by Andrew Roach, music by Connor Buchanan and Andrew Roach. CC-BY-SA 4.0

Space Patol - The World Beyond The Moon

A made-for-tv Feature Film comprised of 3 episodes of Space Patrol from 1954. (see bellow for the full details on the episodes.) This kind of thing was pretty common in the 60s, with Rocky Jones Space Ranger receiving this treatment several times, but I’ve never seen it done for Space Patrol.

The end result is pretty good, when taken in context. Space Patrol was, of course, a live show. The special effects were done in camera, everything was done in one continuous take. The fact that it produced anything watchable, much less something that approximates a feature film is astounding.

I really enjoyed this. the transfer is a little soft around the edges, but that appears to be a defect in the original film, and not an artifact of our transfer process (I’m going to do some more checks, if I was mistaken on this, I’ll upload an improved copy in the future), but otherwise it looks Wonderful. The special effects and model shots in this episode are Astounding, and really drive home what made Space Patrol such a beloved show.

Portions of these episodes are available in varying quality around the web, but I’m fairly certain this is the first time that the Feature Length version (which, frankly, has only the smallest of differences from the TV version) has ever been made available online.

Thanks!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider signing up for my newsletter. or following me on Mastodon.

~ajroach42.com