So many things:

• A closed caption system like youtube. I’m deaf so 90% of peertube videos are just unwatchable to me.
• A working mobile app.
• An easy guide to instances that is clear on which instances are mainly local vids and which basically federate with everything. Ideally, a couple, lemmy.world, lemm.ee style peertube instances that are general purpose and kind of have everything I can direct people who want to join too.
• A non-personalised algorithm. Ie. recommend similar high rated videos.

Search.

If I go to youtube, and I search for content, it’s either there, or it’s not.

If I go to peertube, I need to then exit the site, search on AN UNRELATED 3RD PARTY SITE, and then I can get results from more than the local instance.

If I go to an instance that’s nothing but stamp collecting, the trending videos are going to be about stamp collecting. That doesn’t mean all of peertube is talking about stamp collecting. I’m just on the wrong instance, and the site itself is fractured and borderline useless.

Now you can include a feature to tell peertube that you DO want to see trending, local only, as a stamp collector, on a stamp collecting instance, that would be really useful! But also, if I don’t give a fuck about stamps, as mkst people don’t, the default should be peertube wide trending across ALL instances. I mean, if I don’t care about stamps I’m on the wrong instance to begin with, but that’s besides the point.

I feel like peertube should be each instance is a different type of content. Want to watch guys go fishing? There’s an instance just for that. With multiple different channels, each from different people, each covering different fishing topics. But your whole life isn’t just one topic. So you go to a different instance, one for automobiles, and you follow the channels that post videos about your car. Then you go to a cooking instance, and find a channel that’s just a guy showing you how to bake pies and cakes while running from the police.

Your searches, will 99% of the time not find the most relevant results if we seperate the content based on instance. So the search as is, is really limited and fragmented to have to go to another site, search, find the video, come back to peertube, log in, go to the video directly, and THEN subscribe to the content.

See how jarring that is, compared to youtube? Search, click, play/subscribe. All in 10 seconds.

It’s surprising that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way in the UI to just see a list of creators/channels on a local instance. So, that’s the first thing I’d change to improve discoverability.

The way I currently find relevant content is by going to Sepia Search, putting in exact words that I think are likely to be in the title of at least one video on a channel that would likely also have a lot of other relevant content, and then going through that channel’s playlists. Those searches often lead me to single user instances with only one or two channels (e.g. a channel that has a backup of that user’s YouTube content and a channel with a backup of their Twitch or OwnCast or whatever streams). When it leads me to a generalist instance or one with a relevant subject/theme though, I’ve had little luck finding content from anyone else unless they’ve posted recently (compared to other users). Often the content that is most relevant to me is not what is newest but the archives from years ago. (New content is relevant though once I want to follow someone in particular, but it’s not what I want to see first.)

Another issue I’ve encountered is with the behavior of downloaded videos. I greatly appreciate that PeerTube provides a URL for direct download, and I prefer to watch videos in my own player downloaded in advance (so I can watch offline; pause and resume trivially after putting my computer to sleep; etc). H264 MP4 works fine for this, but the download seems to be some sort of chunked variant of it (for HLS?) which requires the player to read in the entire file to figure out the length or seek accurately. Having to wait a minute or two to be able to seek each time I open a large video file off my HDD is an irritating papercut. I suspect there’s likely a way to fix it by including an index in the file (or in a sidecar file) but I don’t know how to do it – short of re-encoding the entire video again which I’d rather not do since it both takes a long time and can result in quality loss. (EDIT ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -movflags faststart output.mp4 repacks the video quickly.) This usually doesn’t affect newly added videos (where the download link includes the pattern /download/web-videos and a warning is shown that it’s still being transcoded) but does when that’s done (the URL includes /download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos instead); so, this is something that happens as a result of PeerTube’s reprocessing.

Downloads from the instances that I’ve found to be most relevant to me are also pretty unreliable (connection is slow and drops a lot), so I use wget with automatic retries (and it sometimes still needs manual retries…) rather than downloading through my browser which tends to fail and then often annoyingly start over completely if I request a retry… It would be really nice if I could check that I’ve downloaded the file correctly and completely with a sha256 hash or something.

Unskippable one-hour long ads. 👌

I want the ability to have everything behind a login. I don’t want people not signed in watching videos and wasting bandwidth.

I think it’s mainly the content. We need some good content, creative people and interesting videos on the platform. Yeah and maybe discoverability. People also need to get those videos displayed/recommended to them. Other than that, a good app is always nice. That’s already been worked on. But regarding the technology, I think Peertube works quite nicely these days. And it has a good amount of features as well.

Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms

@asudox I love the idea of peertube. I have a couple of accounts. It used to be easier to load new content by URL when it supporfted input from YouTube, but YT has gone out of their way to maintain their virtual monoply. In order for such a service to be more useful than just sharing videos with your immediate friends and family you need a way for creaters to make money, which i think is going to be easier on #NOSTR . I think a better question is how do we make nostr useful for more than just bitcoinbois.

It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There’s a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.

The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.

Automatic subtitles. I know… Not the easiest functionality to develop but I do miss it from Youtube.

I tried it, but gave up months ago. Decentralization is what we’re all about, but without a centralized index of what’s available, finding videos on PeerTube is more work than watching them is worth.