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.

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.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOP
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    19 hours ago

    Do you think this could become popular enough it to be useful?

    Everything starts from zero, so really it just requires a push for the project to get started.

    Public BitTorrent trackers for other media are barely seeded as it is and they have been active for decades.

    I don’t think I agree with this. Many torrents have thousands of seeders, and even if I search for old movies, I can find ones with at least a handful of seeders. Given the popularity of youtube videos, its possible that people would seed their favorites if they have the possibility to do so.

    Actually considering the db is just one massive torrent.csv file I guess you can’t really sensor that.

    Yep, its kinda wild, that the entire index of popular torrents (which equates to most popular media humankind has created), fits in a CSV file of less than 200MB. Makes it pretty hard to censor in that case.