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=...).
- 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
- 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 videos folder. The torrent file is saved in the torrents folder.
Add the torrent to your torrent app, such as qbittorrent.
I’m not a techie so take my feedback in that light, but I wonder if organizing hosting around topics would help facilitate this at all?
My rationale is that I personally only use youtube for two topics and could make a pretty good list of the channels people care about in those topics. I think if someone knew they were contributing specifically to hosting a subset of, for example, ‘anime youtube,’ for the other enthusiasts, that might help eliminate the piecemeal problem someone mentioned (for example if everyone only uploaded their favorites it might be hard to find full albums).
This could also help facilitate donations, people might be more likely to donate to an ‘anime youtube’ super seeder than a generalist. It would also help in terms of knowing what content to expect to be available which is a frustration with current alternatives.
One thing I think this approach misses is legitimate buy in from creators. I wish there was a platform we could encourage our favorite creators to post their videos to instead of or alongside youtube but the cost and expertise required to host video is a big barrier, I think.