Tribler roadmap - becoming an open Youtube streaming service ?

[synctext]

Dear Community,

Should we work towards a Youtube-type of streaming experience?
A Bittorrent-based, self-hosted, less toxic alternative of Youtube?

OR keep close to traditional file sharing experience from July 2001?

Tribler started in April 2005. We had at one point a mix of content: any Youtube video, any Liveleak, and any Bittorrent swarm. All with one unified search algorithm. So we could mix the best of classic Tribler: no website, no DNS dependancy, all Bittorrent swarm. Plus Youtube experience, streaming all their Creative Commons content. Basically, do you want the integrated player back? Youtube content support would bloat the Tribler installer with full Web3 browser, web codecs and Javascript support.

Existing Youtube-focussed projects:
https://invidious.io/screenshots/
https://freetubeapp.io/
https://joinpeertube.org/
https://mediacms.io/

These project do great work. Yet, they are not attack-resilient (e.g. classic web servers, DNS hijacking vunerabilities) and fail to offer our Tor-level privacy.

Please let us know where to go with Tribler!
We got fresh millions in funding till 2033. Let the swarm grow !

[egbertbouman]

We created a experimental version of Tribler featuring integrated MPV video playback for improved streaming. Our initial experiments with an embedded Qt WebView used too many resources, so we instead chose to launch MPV as a lightweight standalone popup window.

You can view our progress here. Please test the early builds using the Windows or Linux binaries and share your feedback here.

[nitmeare]

I would love to see a decentralized streaming app based on Tribler. But would that change the legal situation?

The EU is increasingly over-regulating the internet—introducing things like age and ID checks on social media and APPs under the guise of 'protecting the youth.' If someone were to upload adult content to a Tribler-based streaming service, it could potentially cause legal trouble and so on.

Perhaps it would be more wise to develop this streaming app as an independent fork, completely separate from main Tribler. It could be maintained by someone outside the EU, where doing so is 100% legal. That way, if any legal trouble arises, it won't affect the development of the Tribler core. The community could run and distribute it freely, without exposing the main project to any legal risks by the EU bureaucracy.

Users then also could choose if the want the Core version just for Torrent Downloading. Or the version that is specialized on actual content Steaming.

[balupton]

For me, the best way to achieve this and all the other ambitious is having Tibler being published as a core like libtorrent as well as the apps (web server, cli, desktop; the current combo of all three) that consumes the core. Then people can take the core and do all sorts of nifty things with it, such as:

• a magic wormwhole alternative, where i can just share specific files directly from my hard drive to as many people as possible
• an ipfs alternative, where I can give it an entire directory and it goes off and indexes and shares everything - this is best achieved alongside what bittorrent v2 enables with its per file hashing
• a popcorn time alternative which this discussion thread is for
• a quiet/veilid/firebase alternative for anonymous data syncing between peers in all sorts of different apps; for instance, a screentime monitoring productivity compete app, or a habit tracking app, or your generic chat/messaging apps, or say a reddit file sharing app, or a protondrive app, and so on

Re the liveleak / leaked reality reference, having an app catered to that would also make sense, as otherwise such content that shows depravity and suffering are universal human qualities gets purged from the internet, and allows pundits to seed false tribal purity narratives because counter evidence gets purged - especially in the time of so much war crime documentation constantly getting purged.

For a lot of this, webtorrent support would enable a wide range of consumption interfaces and devices.