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.
That’s one of the points of a decentralizing project; to move people off of youtube, and get many people to help share content that youtube/google currently controls. Creating torrents of their current youtube videos is an intermediary step… the end goal is if things like this get enough traction, content creators would move entirely off youtube, and to things like mastodon or lemmy communities, and post magnet links of their videos.
As stated above sometimes this could be 500GB for some channels, and most users don’t have the HD space for that. It’d be better for videos to be more granular, and try to get the watchers of videos to participate in the torrenting, not just archivers with a ton of extra HD space.