What is Nostube?
Nostube is video on Nostr. A video is a signed Nostr event that points to media files; the files live on Blossom servers, and the events live on Nostr relays. No single company holds the videos, the audience or the account: your Nostr key is your channel, and any compatible client can show your videos.
This repository contains several ways to use that:
| Part | What it is | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| nostu.be web app | A video client: home feed, shorts, playlists, comments, likes and zaps across Nostr relays | Viewers and creators who publish to public relays and Blossom servers |
| Nostube Server | One self-hosted package with a creator homepage, Studio, a Nostr relay and Blossom storage | Creators who want their own site and storage, on the internet or on a home network |
| Embed player | An iframe player and oEmbed endpoint for any Nostr video | Website owners and blogs |
How the pieces fit
- Video events. Each video is an addressable NIP-71 event: kind 34235 for landscape videos and kind 34236 for portrait shorts. Its
imetatags list the media variants (resolution, codec, hash, URLs) and the thumbnail. - Blobs. Media files are identified by their SHA-256 hash. The same file can be stored on several Blossom servers (mirrors), and players fall back between them. See Blossom storage.
- Uploads. Nostube converts videos to web-friendly formats in the browser, uploads them to your Blossom servers and publishes the event to your relays. See Uploads and transcoding.
- Relays. Clients read video events from relays. nostu.be reads public relays; a Nostube Server runs its own relay and can keep everything on it.
Which one do I need?
- Watch and publish on public Nostr: use nostu.be. Nothing to install.
- Run your own channel or a curated video site: use Nostube Server. It includes its own homepage and the Studio for uploads and settings.
- Show Nostr videos on an existing website: use the embed player.
- Host the full nostu.be client yourself: see Self-hosting the web app.
Self-hosting options compares these in more detail, and the tour shows what they look like.