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:

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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

• yt-dlp
• mktorrent
• wget

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.