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.

Torrent-Tube Search

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 videos folder. The torrent file is saved in the torrents folder.

Add the torrent to your torrent app, such as qbittorrent.

  • Niquarl@lemmy.ml
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    11 hours ago

    Considering so many torrents seem to die I doubt this would catch on for anybody but the biggest youtubers… Unless you can get those authors to join in this.

    It would need to hit a pretty large critical mass to start being possible. I see you also posted with datahoarders, that’s the only hope I guess.

    Might I recommend you add some kind of discovery feed ? I wanted to search for something but I couldn’t find anything, unfortunately in your search engine.

    • thanksforreading@lemmy.ml
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      10 hours ago

      People upload to Youtube so they can extract a small share of the rents from surveillance capitalism. If you don’t solve that problem then nothing will change.