cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/49015971
YouTube is still one of the major points of centralization on the internet, so I’ve been brainstorming ways around the problem.
From the readme:
Torrent-Tube is a set of tools to help decentralize YouTube videos, by moving them to torrents, which can be shared by many people. It includes:
- A Torrent-Tube search site which searches the Torrents-csv search engine to see if the given YouTube video already exists, and is being seeded.
- It does this by extracting the YouTube [VIDEO_ID] from a link, which you can also do manually if you like (IE, the text after
watch?v=...).- A script to download, and create torrent files from YouTube videos, with a uniform naming style and format, taken from TheFrenchGhosty’s YouTube-DL-Scripts.
- You will need to upload these torrent files yourself to a service (details below), and seed them.
In the future, it may be possible to create a browser plugin that checks a video link that you’re currently watching for existing torrents.
Create torrent script
Requirements
Instructions
Copy a YouTube video URL.
# Clone this repo git clone https://github.com/dessalines/torrent-tube # Run the script ./create_torrent.sh [YOUTUBE_URL]The video will download, and is saved in the
videosfolder. The torrent file is saved in thetorrentsfolder.Add the torrent to your torrent app, such as qbittorrent.
While moving video files to torrents improves distribution resilience, relying on a centralized search index like torrents-csv reintroduces a single point of control and potential censorship. To truly decentralize the metadata layer, consider whether the search infrastructure itself can be federated or if the client should handle local indexing to eliminate dependency on any external discovery service.