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.
A question I like to ask a lot whenever I see a new project that is similar to other existing or popular projects:
If a developer can answer these questions, it tells me they have a clear picture of what their project is and should be.
So, I ask the same to you:
None of those are attempts to decentralize youtube. Piped and invidious are only front ends for youtube, which can easily be blocked by youtube at any moment, which has happened in the case of tons of third party clients.
yt-dlp is a very useful tool (which this projects uses), to download youtube videos. It does not help collectively share them, as torrents would.
Peertube and other youtube alternatives are based on centralized hosting. This is completely unsustainable, because the HD space required for servers quickly grows out of hand, and becomes extremely expensive. Meanwhile, torrents are shared hosting, where many people are sharing files at once. It is the main way large files like movies are distributed over the internet, for decades now. We should apply that same effort to creating torrents for youtube videos, in the same way that is already done for other large files.