How to watch deleted Youtube videos: a new method
I discovered a method for recovering banned Youtube videos that may be of use to all of you. While it isn't perfect and doesn't work 100% of the time, it has already helped me immensely.
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We’ve all had that awful sensation before - the one you get when you’re diving deep into a particular subject, and you come across a dead link associated with information you believe to be important. There’s nothing worse than clicking on a page of what thought was going to be a goldmine of resources only to find that it is now deleted, and totally unrecoverable via the usual archiving methods.
Luckily, using archive.is and the Wayback Machine at archive.org has always allowed me to mostly avoid the dreaded scenario above. While that scenario is sometimes unavoidable, typically using the above archiving services ensures that almost everything is recoverable in some shape or form.
However, this brings me to one consistent issue I have when it comes to archiving content on the web: archiving Youtube videos.
To the best of my knowledge, the recovery process for a deleted YouTube video differs from that of a deleted webpage in that, typically, a webpage can be recovered in its entirety (minus some embedded images or animations/videos), but Youtube videos seemingly cannot. If one were to try and archive a Youtube video using the standard methods of Wayback Machine and archive.is, the only thing they’d achieve is capturing a screenshot of the video on the page itself, not archiving the full video. So, while it may be feasible to retrieve a visual representation of the page through screen capture, thereby establishing the video's prior existence, the actual playback of the video is unattainable, and of course its the playback of the video and its contents that really matters most. As far as I can tell, the survival of content posted onto Youtube rests solely in the hands of those people that download digital copies to their physical harddrives, and/or reuploads the videos onto other sites that allow video hosting and downloads.
However, we know that in many cases - especially with video - this doesn’t always happen. Just look at 9/11 Lost Media discussions for a perfect example - there are videos in existence that were available to watch online around 2005-2007, but have since been lost in the ether. This is a result of the inability to archive videos in the conventional way, nobody saving them, or the videos being deleted after they were saved for one reason or another.
This puts us in an unfortunate position if we were to go base our claims off of the content found in a Youtube video. The information and evidence featured within this hypothetical Youtube video could be damning, and our claims could be solid and grounded in reality - however, the deletion of such a video would prove catastrophic to our claims, as now we must scramble to find a copy of that exact video uploaded somewhere else online. At that point, though, so many additional elements are introduced: for one, finding an external copy strips us of the ability to prove which channel it originated on. Additionally, depending on how “viral” or popular the video was, the likelihood of finding the original version plummets; it becomes difficult to find the video without edits, added commentary, or other manipulations. As I said before, we can try to use Wayback or archive.is to recover the Youtube video, but we will fall short, as we would only be able to recover a screen capture of the now-deleted video. So, while we are able to prove that the video did at one point exist on whichever channel it existed on, we still have the bigger problem: being unable to archive or recover the actual playback content of the deleted videos themselves.
However, I recently found a method for recovering deleted Youtube videos that solves a lot of the issues laid out above. While the method is not perfect and is far from 100% reliable, I now employ this method on every single deep dive I do, especially when I conduct research into older topics such as 9/11, where many now-deleted blogs and pages link to many now-deleted Youtube videos. It’s been about 5 or 6 months since I discovered this method, but I’ve used it regularly since then and can estimate that it has a success rate of around 60-65% for me. It’s good enough where, if there’s a video you deem incredibly valuable that gets removed from Youtube, definitely try to recover it with this. It works consistently enough where it would be foolish not to try.
With that, here’s the technique. It’s super simple. If you’d like a visual element to the process, you can watch my demonstration video of the process below. I didn’t add any voiceover or commentary though, so you’ll have to follow the below steps alongside the video. It’s pretty straight forward though. If you have issues, please leave a comment below.
Demonstration video (no audio until end, sorry):
HOW TO RECOVER DELETED YOUTUBE LINKS
When you’re watching a Youtube video, the URL for the video usually takes the following format (NOTE: I replaced the actual “.” with “(dot)” above so the videos didn’t embed on this page. Obviously, those links require the “.” to work. Just FYI):
www.youtube(dot)com/watch?v=FXddYoeeuOA
It is the string of digits at the end that is most important, as that represents the Video’s unique ID.
1.) Obtain the link to the deleted Youtube video that you would like to recover
2.) Take the full link (www.youtube(dot)com/watch?v=FXddYoeeuOA), and delete the “watch?v=”. Replace it with “embed/”
Deleting the “watch?v=” leaves us with: [www.youtube(dot)com/FXddYoeeuOA]
Inserting the “embed/” brings us to: [www.youtube(dot)com/embed/FXddYoeeuOA]
The new URL in full removes the '“watch?v=” and replaces it with "“/embed/”, leaving us with the final result of:
www.youtube(dot)com/embed/FXddYoeeuOA
3.) Now, take that link and plug it into the search bar as if you were navigating to the video itself. You will notice that it still does not work despite adding “/embed/” to it.
We need to use Wayback Machine (archive.org) to (possibly) make it work.
4.) Copy your new link [www.youtube(dot)com/embed/FXddYoeeuOA] and paste it into archive.org
5.) Search. Upon searching for it, you will be brought to a page that looks like the image below. For the example link I’m using for this demonstration, this is how it looks for me - it will vary depending on what you’re trying to recover. However, it should look similar to this overall:
This horizontal segmented box represents the years. Each black vertical bar within those boxes represents a functional archived version of the webpage at the chosen time. For example, if you select 2013, the style and layout of the Youtube interface will appear as it did in 2013. In other words, it’s like browsing the webpage as if you were back in 2013 yourself.
Anyway, select whichever year you prefer or whichever works toward your objective:
Clicking on one of the years in the boxes at the top generates a calendar of that year underneath it, and notates via color when the webpage was archived/screenshotted. For the example link I’m using, we can see that there are screenshots of the video on February 3rd, 2014 and June 5th, 2014. Since they are highlighted in blue, that typically means they are viewable (there are some screencaptures that are designated as green or gold which never work…for more information on how archive.org works, simply visit their website. It’s outside the scope of this brief article).
Selecting one of the screenshotted dates will bring up a dropdown menu like below. The dropdown menu will include all the separate screenshots they have for whichever date you selected. In my case, there is only one screenshot from February 3rd:
Click whichever snapshot you want (or whichever is available to you). This will bring you to a version of the webpage from that specific year.
When you do this, you will
6.) Watch the video!
If the video is able to recovered, you will be brought to a black screen upon clicking the snapshot URL, and the video will either play in a small box, or play super-enlarged or in full screen. If the dimensions of the video are messed up (if you watch my demonstration video, you can see what I mean; the video loads up to be super large, so I had to double click it to view it in conventional full screen), simply double click the screen to shift it into conventional full screen.
Now you are able to recover and watch important Youtube videos. To share your newly recovered video, simply copy and paste the URL in the address bar. In my case for this example, it would be
https://web.archive.org/web/20140203041241/www.youtube.com/embed/FXddYoeeuOA
As you saw earlier, too, remember: the only way this works is if you take the new embed link and insert it into Wayback Machine; it doesn’t work if you take the embed link and try to search it regularly.
I touched on it a bit earlier, but I think the reason this works is because, while platforms like archive.is offer a means to archive webpages (including those hosting YouTube videos), their functionality primarily preserves the static elements of the page rather than the dynamic content such as the video itself. This is why when you visit an archived webpage you are often unable to see embedded images, videos, .gifs, or thumbnails, and only able to see people’s posts and comments. When a YouTube video is embedded within a webpage, archive.is typically captures a snapshot of the webpage at a particular moment in time, storing the HTML, CSS, and other static resources that constitute the page's appearance. However, the video file, being a separate entity hosted on YouTube's servers, remains outside the scope of archive.is's archiving process. Consequently, attempting to retrieve a deleted YouTube video solely through archive.is yields only the archived webpage without the accompanying video playback functionality.
Conversely, when a YouTube video is embedded on a webpage or accessed through an "embed" link, it operates within a frame distinct from the standard YouTube interface. This embedding technique essentially encapsulates the video player within an HTML document, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated into various webpages. However, when attempting to access an archived version of the video through platforms like the Wayback Machine, the original context in which the video was embedded may not be fully replicated. As a result, although the video file itself may be retrievable, the absence of the original webpage environment often leads to a simplified presentation, typically manifesting as a black screen with the video element. This discrepancy arises from the intricacies of how embed links function within web architecture, highlighting the need for alternative methods to access and view archived content in its intended context.
So, using Archive.is on a regular Youtube video won’t capture the video, but will capture the entirety of the page it was hosted on.
However, by using the embed method, we achieve the reverse: we are able to recover the embedded video file, but not the static contents of the page it was embedded into itself.
Anyway, that’s it! That’s how you can recover dead Youtube links to watch now-deleted and long forgotten Youtube videos. As I said, this doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it works frequently enough - and is simple enough - to where I employ it regularly in my investigations now.
If you found this useful, please consider following me here on Substack. I plan on writing more often, and would love to have your readership! I have many interesting things to share, and I look forward to sharing important information with you through a brand new medium.
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