RetroFedI'd like some feedback on a YouTube decentralization project I'm working on: Torrent-Tube
Dessalineshttps://github.com/dessalines/torrent-tube
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.
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
videosfolder. The torrent file is saved in thetorrentsfolder.Add the torrent to your torrent app, such as qbittorrent.
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I have no real feedback on your project specifically, but I’ve had this same concern of YouTube eventually probably going away or being totally enshittified and the videos on it becoming effectively lost, so I’ve been archiving a few of my favourite channels using ytdl-sub. It’s a script wrapper for yt-dlp that downloads the videos along with a bunch of metadata.
Personally I’ve been adding them to my Jellyfin server for now under a separate category (ytdl-sub creates Jellyfin-friendly metadata). Some kind of community archive would of course be best, but there’s many difficulties with that. Most prominently the fact that YouTube isn’t dead or completely enshittified yet, so there’s no driving motivation for the effort. Copyright issues would be the second major problem.
Creating an individual torrent for every video doesn’t seem like a great solution, because the typical channel has lots of videos, up to thousands. Just between the four channels I’ve archived I have about 2000 video files, which is getting in the realm of torrent clients starting to choke on that many torrents.
Also these four channels add up to about 500 GB of data, which is why I pretty quickly started having second thoughts about archiving every channel I’m subscribed to. I mostly went with 1080p quality; settling for 720p would probably help a lot in the disk space department.
Nice, seems very similar to TheFrenchGhosty’s scripts that are being used here.
Creating an individual torrent for every video doesn’t seem like a great solution, because the typical channel has lots of videos, up to thousands.
It’s def a tradeoff, and you’re correct that we could potentially seed entire channels.
But seeding single videos is IMO better for a few reasons:
- Torrent clients won’t have to select a subset of files.
- Its more future proof (ie you don’t have to make a new torrent after the channel releases a new video)
- Searching for individual videos is easier, since the torrent name can contain the youtube video_id
- Seeders won’t have to dedicate massive hd space to entire channels, especially since high quality videos nowadays can already be over 1GB. They just seed the specific videos they think are worth keeping.
The main problem I foresee, is streamlining the process of creating and uploading torrents, so that people actually do it.
And a browser plugin could potentially help.
Perhaps grouping by year would be a good compromise. The problem, of course, is what to do if you’re wanting to track channels that still actively upload. I’m not sure there’d really be an audience for that though – if the channel is still active, people can just go watch the videos on YouTube directly, no?
Most torrent clients start having trouble at around 10k torrents, forcing use of multiple instances, and that will be fairly easy to hit by seeding entire channels worth of videos as individual torrents.
I feel like most people think of YouTube in terms of creators they like rather than individual videos, and the way the site is structured makes it difficult to cleanly subdivide a creator you like into smaller parts than “all their videos”. Therefore if one archives something, more often than not they’ll probably archive an entire channel, so it’d be easy to end up seeding a ton of videos.
The other option is that they archive random individual videos that mean a lot to them, but I feel like that approach is rather incompatible with a private tracker-style community archive to begin with. It’d be a bit like a music tracker where people just upload individual songs they like.
For stuff like this I wish there was a better option than torrents. If only IPFS was actually practically useful…
if the channel is still active, people can just go watch the videos on YouTube directly, no?
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.
Therefore if one archives something, more often than not they’ll probably archive an entire channel, so it’d be easy to end up seeding a ton of 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.
I’ve gone down to 360p for some of mine for better storage. If they weren’t visually important to begin with then that’s enough I think.
ParagoneBe careful which jurisdiction you, and your project, are in.
The titanium-curtain will be coming-down later this year, and there will be alot of police-state aggression, in many countries, soon.
Please make certain you are safe to be doing this, wherever you are.
In the US, RuleOfJustLaw already is banished, & TuleOfLegalism is fading, as RuleOfAuthority supplants it..
Humankind’s Great Filter isn’t going to be .. civilized.
🙏
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.
This seems like a fun idea but you just started it five hours ago? How developed even is this?
It’s a nice concept and honestly a better concept than peertube which will never go anywhere
The torrents-csv service has been around for a few years, and its one of the major components of this, since it can allow people adding torrents via pull requests.
People have been able to create torrents from youtube videos ever since yt-dl came out. The main difficulty is streamlining the process and getting people to actually do it.
TundraIt really shouldnt be hosted on github - how long until google gets this taken down?
TropicalDingdongWait isn’t Dessalines a prick? Can’t remember what for, only that they’re heavily disliked. Are they a .ml mod?
Edit: Co-creator of Lemmy and a “tankie”, it seems, and many folk don’t like the way Dessalines runs their instance. Good thing we have others to choose from
Co-creator of Lemmy and a “tankie”, it seems
Yea, lol, writes decent software though and mostly keeps their ideology out of the code
Why am I cross-posting .ml content?
I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to help vitilize non-.ml comms and make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don’t want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some active niche comms.
Some highlights from the link:
Dessalines, head .ml admin, lead Lemmy dev actively spreading genocide denialism https://sh.itjust.works/post/61371958
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068
“If you don’t support Russia then you just don’t understand geopolitics” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
“Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” ~ Davel, .ml admin
https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
>
“NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can’t even put them all here because this comment would be really long.
I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda
On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like “Lemmy? Isn’t that the place with a bunch of tankies?” Or “Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left”. The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team.
Just added an easy way to post these torrents to this (or any) lemmy community: https://github.com/dessalines/torrent-tube/pull/15
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
I think this is pretty clever, kind of like the old Popcorn Time app for YouTube.
Thx! For the record, this doesn’t cover the viewing part, which would require a torrent app and a local media player of your choosing. Any should work tho.
edit: I’ll add that to the instructions.
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.
Torrents-csv does use a crawler I believe to add new torrents. torsniff is one of those spiders that works really well.
Ya I’m not sure how to handle the UI side of things yet, especially for content discovery.
Dream might be a good starting point actually. It’s been last updated a year ago, but it does have a solid core for decentralized streaming on top of bittorrent and kademlia DHT. It handles upload, search, and stream videos without central servers.
Nice, I’ll check it out.
Nice, sounds a bit like PeerTube if I am not mistaken. Is the difference that you don’t have to upload a video to make it available in a decentralised matter?
The main difference from peertube, is that peertube is based on webtorrents (which after many years, its been shown that ppl don’t use them), whereas this is based on regular torrents.
You still do need to create a torrent for the videos and seed them, if one doesn’t exist already. But this has the possibility of decentralizing video hosting away from youtube.
I’ll be using this process for every video I watch now.
Any way to combine yours/ordinary torrents and peertube web-torrents, so the systems can support each other ?
The majority of torrenters don’t use webtorrents, and I’m only grabbing the most popular trackers for building these.
Sounds neat! I look forward to trying it out myself shortly. Thank you for sharing.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml mktorrent doesn’t seem to work on windows. Is there an alternative you would consider or can suggest I try?
I don’t use windows so I don’t know.
A question I like to ask a lot whenever I see a new project that is similar to other existing or popular projects:
If a developer can answer these questions, it tells me they have a clear picture of what their project is and should be.
So, I ask the same to you:
None of those are attempts to decentralize youtube. Piped and invidious are only front ends for youtube, which can easily be blocked by youtube at any moment, which has happened in the case of tons of third party clients.
yt-dlp is a very useful tool (which this projects uses), to download youtube videos. It does not help collectively share them, as torrents would.
Peertube and other youtube alternatives are based on centralized hosting. This is completely unsustainable, because the HD space required for servers quickly grows out of hand, and becomes extremely expensive. Meanwhile, torrents are shared hosting, where many people are sharing files at once. It is the main way large files like movies are distributed over the internet, for decades now. We should apply that same effort to creating torrents for youtube videos, in the same way that is already done for other large files.
Could one integrate this with apps like NextTube or PipePipe? I.e., When I search for a video on those apps, they search the torrent index first, then search Frama Tube / PeerTube second, then search YouTube-proper last. While I’m streaming a video from any of these sources, I am then also downloading and seeding it to the torrent network and I keep seeding the last videos I watched on a rolling basis until an allocated memory space on my disk is full and the oldest or least requested video in that local buffer is deleted to make space for new; while I’m on Wifi to save mobile data? I think providing such seamless integration is the best way to get this space densely populated enough to be useful.
I like your logic here. Torrent index -> alternative platforms -> YT proper.
Assuming the torrent index becomes decentralized, there are really two categories where it makes sense to build this in:
1) The YouTube frontends, as you mention
2) The self-hosted downloaders that already exist, like Tube Archivist
I think the second category is where you get all the seeding traction. Sure, it would be great if the Android frontends also participate, but there are thousands of NAS devices that are already downloading YouTube videos for a single user. If there was an addon that allowed all of these users to share content automatically, I think there would be a lot of buy in / seeding.
Yes, this could potentially be used in youtube front-ends. IE show the magnet link of a given video if it exists, so that it could be torrented.
Deleted by moderator
A federated search service / index (especially unmoderated) could quickly fill up with spam. So at least the torrent additions / adders themselves need to be vetted and trustworthy for a search to work correctly.
And of course torrents-csv doesn’t have to be the only place hosting magnet links. They could easily be posted to any federated app, like a lemmy community or mastodon also.
Considering so many torrents seem to die I doubt this would catch on for anybody but the biggest youtubers… Unless you can get those authors to join in this.
It would need to hit a pretty large critical mass to start being possible. I see you also posted with datahoarders, that’s the only hope I guess.
Might I recommend you add some kind of discovery feed ? I wanted to search for something but I couldn’t find anything, unfortunately in your search engine.
People upload to Youtube so they can extract a small share of the rents from surveillance capitalism. If you don’t solve that problem then nothing will change.
I really like this idea, and I suppose it could also be built to include videos from other video hosting cites as well in the future.
Do you think this could become popular enough it to be useful? Public BitTorrent trackers for other media are barely seeded as it is and they have been active for decades. Why would people want to seed media they can watch for free on youtube? (to be clear I understand why but it’s difficult to get enough others to understand something like this.)
Another issue is if it does get popular enough to become useful I could imagine this being a major target from YouTube, or do I misunderstand the copyright laws? Actually considering the db is just one massive torrent.csv file I guess you can’t really sensor that. Although I’m not sure if a copyright troll issue could arise.
Also that 38 MiB csv file is insane.
Everything starts from zero, so really it just requires a push for the project to get started.
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.
Yep, its kinda wild, that the entire index of popular torrents (which equates to most popular media humankind has created), fits in a
CSVfile of less than 200MB. Makes it pretty hard to censor in that case.Ok you’ve convinced my now, I do hope we can get YouTube videos away from YouTube.
@dessalines @degoogle please consider #utopeer mastodon.libre-entreprise.com/
Use bittorrent v2 because multiple people downloading the same channel at different time will lead to different torrents and we should share the same swarm.
Configure yt dlp to include subtitles, chapters using mkv container.
I’d prefer using v1 torrents for compatibilities sakes. Also v2 doesn’t appear to have anything that de-dupes similar torrents.
The yt-dlp command is already doing that, check the script.
A crucial use-case would be in-browser video playing from torrent-tube and currently that does not seem possible. I have been looking for an alternative to Catbox for a while and am not too fond of Streamable.
Alternatively could Lemmy get embedded support for playing Peertube videos instead of redirecting to the Peertube website and having to play the video there? Similar to how playing Imgur or Catbox videos works in embedded format without having to go to a different website.
This might not be appreciated but I am not web-technical enough to understand this back-end so I asked an LLM and this is what it said
LLM response:
❯ I would like to create the simplest browser-based viewer for videos uploaded to TorrentTube. Is this possible with just a browser extension (no changes to TorrentTube)?
● No.
A standalone browser extension cannot achieve this—regardless of the platform—due to two fundamental constraints:
Network limitations: Browsers can’t access torrent swarms directly. Extensions run in a sandbox and lack raw socket access (Manifest V3 has no socket API). The only viable option is WebTorrent over WebRTC, which requires WebRTC-capable seeders and
wss://trackers. Without changes to TorrentTube, no such seeders exist (only qBittorrent seeders are present), leaving the extension with zero peers to connect to.Codec incompatibility:
.mkvfiles aren’t natively playable by the<video>element.Workable solutions require external components (not on TorrentTube’s side):
A streaming gateway (e.g., webtor.io or self-hosted): The extension sends a magnet link to a server that downloads via BitTorrent, remuxes the video, and streams it via HTTP to
<video>. (This is the simplest path.)A local helper app via native messaging: The extension communicates with a local torrent daemon streaming to
localhost.→ Short answer: An extension alone is impossible. An extension + gateway is possible (and requires no TorrentTube changes).
❯ Could TorrentTube itself implement changes to enable direct browser streaming (no gateway/helper)?
● Yes. With three specific changes, TorrentTube could stream torrents directly in the browser:
Seed over WebRTC: Run WebTorrent-hybrid seeders (or similar) to provide browser-compatible peers.
Add
wss://trackers: Modifycreate_torrent.shto include WebRTC-compatible trackers (e.g.,tracker.openwebtorrent.com).Encode to MP4: Output fragmented MP4 (H.264/AAC) instead of
.mkv(usingyt-dlp --remux-video mp4).Result: A minimal WebTorrent.js extension (or even a plain webpage) can stream magnets directly via
<video>+ Media Source Extensions—exactly how instant.io/btorrent.xyz works.Key caveats:
✅ Backward-compatible: Existing swarms (qBittorrent) remain functional.
✅ No transcoding needed: The MP4 format is browser-native.
⚠️ Requires one persistent hybrid seeder: Browser peers vanish when tabs close, so a lightweight always-on seed node is needed (but no server costs).
⚠️ Format shift:
.mkv→.mp4(both formats can coexist for archival/streaming).→ Summary: Changes 1–3 transform TorrentTube into a PeerTube-style system where videos stream directly in the browser via a simple extension.
Want me to draft the modified
create_torrent.sh(withwss://trackers + MP4 output) and a minimal WebTorrent content script for Lemmy?Key improvements: Removed redundancy ("no changes from TorrentTube side"), clarified technical terms ("hybrid seeders,” “fragmented MP4"), standardized formatting, fixed “Torrenthub” → “TorrentTube,” and tightened phrasing while preserving all technical nuance.
I have a little helper in lemmy that shows how to view torrents the easy way: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#torrents
The easy way of installing stremio will probably work for most people. Torrenting inside the browser isn’t an option IMO.