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YouTube will private unlisted videos on July 23, 2021. Making them inaccessible and potentially lost for everyone

Thread Description
if i had a dollar...

DarkMahesvara

varishangout.com
Regular
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.

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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):
  1. Download and install youtube-dlp (the video shows DL but you just need to do the same with DLP)
  2. Get a cookie-txt from your Google Account
    1. download cookies-txt browser addon/extension
    2. login to YouTube
    3. create a cookie.txt by clicking on the addon
    4. place it in the yt-dlp directory
    5. make sure the file name is cookies.Google.txt
  3. Use the following commands in yt-dlp:
    1. 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
    2. 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
Sadly the 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.
 

erobotan

varishangout.com
Artist
Regular
Thanks for the info, my pixiv fanbox use unlisted videos .. it will be bad if i missed this info.
 

Jahy

varishangout.com
At this point, isn't it time to compose a new rule of the Internet stating "if it's a year that ends in a number, Google will mandate another detrimental change to YouTube nobody wanted"? :hana-disgust:

I feel like I say this nearly on repeat these days, but it is absolutely essential that you archive what you want to keep, people. It was already especially true for things like unlisted videos before, but it goes for literally anything online. You never know when something is going to disappear.
 

{o}P

varishangout.com
Person of Interest
I hope every google employee watch’s as everyone they love succumbs to dementia before they themselves die of radiation poisoning.
 

solidhyrax

varishangout.com
Notice how it takes effort to realize that this opt-out is available. One shitty youtube video from their channel, no one is going to watch it. I bet you if they had let everyone see this update, a lot more people would freak out enough to not do this bullshit in the first place.
 

DarkMahesvara

varishangout.com
Regular
unlistedvideos.com is probably the largest unlisted video collection with over 600.000 (653.470 to be exact) unlisted videos!

Somebody already scraped all video IDs which can be used in combination with the filter above to download all videos that where uploaded before 2017.
I'm gonna attempt to download them. Let's see what will run out first, time or storage space :hinata-acid:
 

Jahy

varishangout.com
Somebody already scraped all video IDs which can be used in combination with the filter above to download all videos that where uploaded before 2017.
Haha, holy shit. Let me get this straight.

This whole decision on their behalf was supposedly in the interest of user "privacy" and "security", yet now because of their actions, all vulnerable videos have now been scraped and are ripe for archival.

ironic.gif


This is a multi-billion dollar company. :hinata-hyper:
 

DarkMahesvara

varishangout.com
Regular
Haha, holy shit. Let me get this straight.

This whole decision on their behalf was supposedly in the interest of user "privacy" and "security", yet now because of their actions, all vulnerable videos have now been scraped and are ripe for archival.

View attachment 6147

This is a multi-billion dollar company. :hinata-hyper:
yeah pretty much. It's not like anybody would upload seriously sensitive content even if unlisted. No idea what there plan really is maybe some corpo deals behind the scene.
 
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