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.
An issue I’ve run into has been that every time I try to run yt-dlp I get an error because I haven’t imported cookies from an account or used a browser with them saved.
This may be a noob question, as I went through a certificate course and a half and have self-taught things which are useful in my homelab ever since, but have you guys found a way around that? Also, if not, is it safe-ish to use an account which is linked to my google account which goes back about a decade?
I also apologize if this is inappropriate for this thread, I’d love to see and would be interested in contributing to a decentralized YouTube project like this in any way I can.