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.

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[–] 11 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

That's a really good idea given all the problems with youtube and that they can just take down videos or channels without notice. One thing to explore would be having discovery without necessitating tracker sites. Stuff like dht-spider might be worth a look.

It might also be interesting to take an existing GUI like Freetube and try swapping out the backend with a torrent based one.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Torrents-csv does use a crawler I believe to add new torrents. torsniff is one of those spiders that works really well.

    It might also be interesting to take an existing GUI like Freetube and try swapping out the backend with a torrent based one.

    Ya I'm not sure how to handle the UI side of things yet, especially for content discovery.

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