I spent way too long trying to find I’m a Morning Person made by Julian Smith and found out it has since been unlisted on youtube.
Only reason I finally found it was a direct link to it on another forum which appeared on search page 5 on duckduckgo.

It got me thinking; Is there any service that lists unlisted youtube videos?
Would it be possible to create?

  • Tyoda@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 day ago

    You’d need a constantly growing database of all the videos on there, rechecking all of them every once in a while to see if they are still/now unlisted… maybe if you had infinite youtube api credits… maybe.

      • Tyoda@lemm.ee
        0·
        1 day ago

        Yeah, and it still wouldn’t help you for deleted/privated stuff. You have to mirror the good stuff if you want it around.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          21 hours ago

          Hmm.

          If it’s downloaded and all the associated metadata embedded — which yt-dlp does have the ability to do, but isn’t the default — it’d be possible to index downloaded videos and create some kind of search engine for magnet links for saved YouTube videos.

          EDIT: Oh, though I don’t know whether yt-dlp tries to create identical files on different people’s systems. If it embeds a “downloaded” timestamp or something like that, there might not be a single hash that refers to all downloaded copies.