Yeah if you aren’t down to publicly expose your IP address / port forward, the cheapest way I can think of still involves a several $/mo VPS that just reverse proxies home to a more powerful PC. That’s what I do since I’m behind CGNAT.
Not only is there the issue of getting approval from the video creators, there’s the issue that most PeerTube servers aren’t ready to handle a huge influx in uploads, as this would likely be a bulk operation.
Personally I think mirroring YouTube content would be more viable once ActivityPods lands and is integrated with PeerTube, which could potentially let you self host your PeerTube account data while still being part of a separate “home instance”, which would greatly help with the storage issue for PeerTube as we could all bring our own storage.
Wow that’s impressive! I tend to be very value oriented, and at the sub $5 price, you’re getting so little that I feel like you’re mostly paying for a public IP and bandwidth. And of course selfhosting your compute is usually a win, especially if you already have something laying around. So I just pay the public IP tax for a reverse proxy and home host it all. I would probably go with a cheaper VPS for my reverse proxy but I need the confidence it’ll hold up to multiple friends Plex streaming.