Watching disappeared or not supposed to be watched videos again
Today we are going to talk about the technique which you permit to be able to recover videos from Youtube that was deleted, made private or simply blocked by Youtube itself. With this trick you most of the time would do just that. How is this possible we will explain in this article. Let's go into it.
What was the video I had?
Everybody knows what YouTube is - interesting social media platform where people can share anything through video based content. And many love it, like we do. So much so that we are sometimes using it like the alternative to the TV. Popularity of YouTube seems only to be growing. Things people watch are very broad, and many of us have our favourite channels. We are subscribed to many channels, were watching educational videos, funny shots, guides, or music videos.
We can even use Youtube not only to show our personal films to the world to make us famous but we can upload our footage to the Youtube servers to create a kind of backup space. Many of us make a very very large list of videos in our personal collection. If you were predicting where we're going, you have a pointless point. Yes, you might have a painstakingly crafted playlist on Youtube, but those videos are not in your possession, that means, the author or Youtube can revoke them, delete them, block them etc.
One or more videos have been removed from your playlist
This message might a lot of people take very seriously and personally. How are you supposed to remember every video that you added to a playlist years ago?
It's incredibly frustrating and disappointing if the video you like or the one you watch again and again suddenly disappears. Even more if you don't know what was the video you had in your playlist - for those completists, people with OCD and the author of this article.
Thankfully, there exists ways to find out the title of a deleted Youtube video. With the title or name of the video you can find another - similar one, in the case of music video for example.
Why do Youtube delete videos?
There are multiple reasons for Youtube videos become unavailable.
- The owner simply deletes the video. When youtubers need to re-upload, for doing corrections for example.
- The owner makes the video private. Private videos are available only to people the owner specifies. Owners often make the video private if they don't want to be publicly seen but they also do not want to delete the video.
- The channel cease to exist. If the owner deletes the channel, or its account, or the channel was terminated due to violating Youtube’s rules, all the videos will go away too.
- The video contains inappropriate or illegal content. Youtube will remove the video if it's breaking the Youtube terms of service.
- The video has a copyright claim. If there is a claim process in place due to copyright content, it may happen that the video is blocked until the situation is resolved.
How to dig it out of the grave
As you might notice, when you try to play the deleted video, Youtube doesn't give you any direct information on what was the video, the title, thumbnail, nor channel name, anything could help you identify it.
But! Once you have opened a deleted video - this means you're trying to play it, on the top in the search bar, you can see the URL of the video, something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NVT1VkBDWE&list=WL&index=1574
This contains the original URL of the video, it's the part before the symbol &.
The identifier of the video is everything after v= and before &, in this case, its ‘5NVT1VkBDWE’ .
Copy this piece and try to paste it into google search. This may reveal some information about what the video was about, or perhaps also its thumbnail. On some occasions you might be lucky and Google might have a cache copy of it or the video was reuploaded or shared to another site where you can watch it.
When you have found nothing, if you retrieved the name or title of the video in the last step, well you can still google it to see what comes up.
If there is still nothing, let's step up and use the next way to recover it. It may not always work, but it’s worth trying and you also will learn more about the internet and it actually may come handy not only with Youtube videos but also with other stuff.
Internet Archive
Let me introduce you to the Internet Archive organization, a non-profit library of free books, movies, software, music, websites, basically the internet as we know it - content created by people.
What this glorious site does, is that it takes snapshots of websites to their digital archive so they can be seen way later in the future, and yes, it offers free access to all of it.
It basically means that you can see pages as they looked like at a certain point in the past.
Type https://archive.org/ into your browser.
From there you can access a deleted Youtube video in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
It doesn't guarantee success though, it may happen that Wayback Machine has not archived that URL, or Archive.org won't have the actual video saved, so you can't watch it. But as long as the page with the video was archived, you would be able to see the title, channel, upload date, and even the description.
Also, with time, there is a bigger chance that the Internet Archive crawler found the Youtube page you're after and the video is archived, videos that were quickly deleted probably didn't have time to be archived in the first place.
Wayback Machine
Here you would need the original Youtube video address again in the search field, as we explained before, without & and anything behind it.
Paste your video’s URL into the search bar near the label WayBackMachine and press enter.
After that the Archive.org will search the servers and databanks for the data, so you need to wait a bit (give it a couple of minutes).
And now, if you're lucky you’ll see something like this:
Saved 12 times between January 13, 2016 and November 18, 2018.
Upload history of the deleted video will be arranged in a calendar form.
Click on one of the dates to see if you’re able to play the video or not. If one doesn't work, keep clicking on other dates until you find the one which you can run. The older date in the range of years may be the right choice.
Hopefully you found it, and when that's a yes - enjoy it!
Conclusion
And there you have it. Hopefully this guide would help someone when the video you loved you need to see one more time.
There is no way to avoid losing videos you don't own on Youtube as they don't belong to you and you can't prevent a channel from deleting its own videos.
If you really care not to lose the video, you can try a video downloader slash converter to convert a video to MP4 directly and save it on your hard drive to be safe. Or in the case the video was yours, remember about the backup in the future.
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