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.
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.
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
That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
I'd be interested in seeing data that supports this.
Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.
AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.
Why is that the right tradeoff? It seems like the Plex/Jellyfin ecosystem has landed on keeping high quality persisted and hardware accelerated transcoding for everything else. Put another way, transcoding capable caches.
londons_explore · · focus · HN ↗
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.
adrianmonk · · focus · HN ↗
maybewhenthesun · · focus · HN ↗
tough · · focus · HN ↗
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
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.
AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
tough · · focus · HN ↗