Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

What I've wanted for a while now is a browser extension that adds a button on youtube video pages, where you click on it and it does yt-dlp downloading but saves it to something like ipfs and posts it to some free video site for indexing.

Basically, there should be a video indexing/search/discovery protocol (don't care if it's still http) where random people can submit metadata and a link to a distributed content-addressable system like ipfs. Alternatives to youtube,tiktok,etc.. even platforms like Bluesky can make use of this. Popular videos get more "seeds"/"mirrors" this way. The biggest problem is getting enough interesting content, so the browser extension helps with that, you just click "share in <insert platform name>" and you have it locally available as well as available on any of your other devices, and now others can see the content without having to use yt.

What you're describing is a piracy platform. That makes it pretty tricky to get off the ground, with regards to funding and outreach.

Write a script to call yt-dlp command with url in clipboard on ipfs server

it's piracy when you share it with others, it can default to act as your personal cloud. It is dropbox/onedrive/gdrive except optionally searchable/shared/indexable by the public or a group of people (those legit services already allow public sharing of arbitrary data).

pirating who? I actually don't know who holds the copywrite to youtube videos. I assume the creators do, and that a lot of them would be happy to have their videos shared. It's google that wants suck the value out of the creations for themselves.

Well as long as you don't know who owns the copyright and/or make an assumption that they'd be cool with it, must be good to go.

What I'd like is essentially a user-controlled caching layer for everything. When you view a webpage or video or something you are fully downloading all of that data, you might as well optimistically write it to a local cache. Then a browser extension could be made that says "save this version" which tells the caching layer to add a tag to all of the assets that were downloaded in this page view. It would create a tag that means all of those assets aren't garbage collected from your local cache and you retain your copy forever.

Super-charging this idea with IPFS is even better. Essentially a collective Internet Archive will be created with every version of every page someone has decided they are interested in, for whatever reason.

This kind of thing would be perfectly feasible with the web as it was designed, which was designed with caching in mind.

But, of course, big corporations like Google will fight hard to stop such a thing happening because they don't want you in control. They want to be in control. They hate peer to peer technologies because they can't control them.

did someone, outside your imagination, say it was "good to go"?