Comment by londons_explore
3 hours ago
I want these things to implement peer to peer caching, so that when 10 people are watching the same video, only one downloads from youtubes own servers.
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
Peer to peer died because (1) a lot of the world, especially outside the US, has terrible upload/bandwidth, (2) HTTPS CDNs got _really_ cheap, far cheaper that p2p technologies like BitTorrent+WebSeed.
There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.
Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.
Delivering the bits is a part of it though. When youtube changes its api in a way that forces NewPipe to change its algorithm, they have to push out a change that forces users to update the app. This is annoying because naturally you won't find NewPipe on the app store so updating the app is tedious for users who use it. The parent's workaround fixes some or all of this nuisance, depending on how implemented
Delivering the bits might not be hard. Storing the bits is hard. Or at least expensive.
You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
Newpipe isn't trying to be a video platform
That would put users at risk of being sued/punished for copyright infrigement.
this is exactly why i worked on webtorrent ~13 years ago https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
there exist distributed alternatives like joinpeertube.org but they never really take off. Consumers like centralization, look at twitter.
I tried using Peertube but finding an instance whose content policy fits what you're meaning to upload and responds to sign-up requests isn't trivial. It's basically perpetual storage they're offering for free so I get it, maybe the real surprise is that youtube makes so much money off of us that they can afford this
Found one in the end when I didn't have a choice anymore and put renewed effort into it (Google's algorithm won't let me into my account anymore, saying they don't have enough information to verify it's me (username, password, recovery email.. not enough apparently, but there is nothing else), so I'm a Peertube exclusive now) but iirc I can't use it for everything, like if I wanted to upload something in Dutch I'd have to find a new server that allows my language
yes, will you also be providing the caching server? Because that's the main blocker I think, nobody has the resources to cache them.
How do you verify you get the right data from your peers? With torrents we know the correct hashes for each block. YouTube probably doesn't do this.
Pretty much worse user experience guaranteed, plz no.
I honestly don't see how those two things are related.
The problem with P2P video is that it's expensive to host and most of the people using it are going to use it for child abuse. It makes it not realistic.
> most of the people using it are going to use it for child abuse.
This is deeply unsubstantiated and does not help contribute to a constructive debate. Please consider thinking more carefully.
“Most” is hyperbolic but it’s a real problem in any system designed for peer to peer hosting or sharing.
If the system is truly distributed it means you might not be able to participate without hosting or transmitting CSAM.
It’s also been used as a deliberate attack, which is known as “pissing in the pool.” Flood the system with CSAM and copyright infringement.
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