Google Announced on the YouTube Help page a change to there policy, making all unlisted videos uploaded prior to January 1, 2017 private. This potentially destroys millions of videos by making them inaccessible to anyone but the original uploader.
There reasoning behind it is that the system used before 2017 is easier to circumvent. Making it possible to access unlisted videos even if you didn't receive the video link/URL (probably because the URLs used were too short making them easy(ier) to guess).
Unlisted = only accessible per link/URL e.g.
Private = only accessible from the account of the uploader
What can you do?
Video creator that were active before 2017 with unlisted videos should follow the guide to check if they are affected and Opt-out of this change.
Viewer that want to preserve affected videos can download them with a google/youtube account and youtube-dlp (not possible with youtube-dl):
EDIT:
Google Drive will have a similar URL update.
There reasoning behind it is that the system used before 2017 is easier to circumvent. Making it possible to access unlisted videos even if you didn't receive the video link/URL (probably because the URLs used were too short making them easy(ier) to guess).
Unlisted = only accessible per link/URL e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Private = only accessible from the account of the uploader
What can you do?
Video creator that were active before 2017 with unlisted videos should follow the guide to check if they are affected and Opt-out of this change.
Viewer that want to preserve affected videos can download them with a google/youtube account and youtube-dlp (not possible with youtube-dl):
- Download and install youtube-dlp (the video shows DL but you just need to do the same with DLP)
- Get a cookie-txt from your Google Account
- download cookies-txt browser addon/extension
- login to YouTube
- create a cookie.txt by clicking on the addon
- place it in the yt-dlp directory
- make sure the file name is
cookies.Google.txt
- Use the following commands in yt-dlp:
- Liked Videos (Get URL for Liked Videos Playlist (works with any other Playlist) (
YouTube Account/Profile -> Playlists -> Liked Videos
)
yt-dlp [liked_videos_url] or [channel_playlist_url] --datebefore 20170101 --match-filter "availability = 'unlisted'" --cookies cookies.Google.txt --download-archive unlisted_videos.txt
- YouTube History (if enabled):
yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/feed/history --datebefore 20170101 --match-filter "availability = 'unlisted'" --cookies cookies.Google.txt --download-archive unlisted_videos.txt
- Liked Videos (Get URL for Liked Videos Playlist (works with any other Playlist) (
Liked Videos
playlist can only hold up to 5000 videos currently (another bad change as i can recall it being as high as 15k). You can read and learn more about youtube-dl here.EDIT:
Google Drive will have a similar URL update.