video-archive
Internet Archive (Video)
The Internet Archive's video holdings: millions of items spanning films, television, and ephemera. Search and metadata are available through the website or the keyless archive.org search API. A primary source for old, obscure, or otherwise vanished footage; it shares the Internet Archive's intermittent 2026 outages and rate-limiting, so occasional retries may be needed.
Why it’s useful & how it works
The Internet Archive's video section is one of the oldest and broadest open repositories of moving image material on the web, covering everything from silent-era films and public-domain television to home movies, advertisements, and government footage. To search it, type keywords into the site's search bar and filter by media type, or use the keyless search API to query by title, subject, creator, or date. Items can be streamed or downloaded directly, and most carry rich metadata you can retrieve programmatically without any account.
What’s inside
Roughly 15 million items categorised as video, encompassing feature films, TV episodes, shorts, news clips, and ephemera. The broader Internet Archive collection exceeds 160 petabytes of data across all media types.
API access
https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=mediatype:movies&output=json ; metadata /metadata/<id>
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Responded HTTP 200 648 ms
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 761 ms
- API, direct
- Responded HTTP 200 323 ms
- API, through a proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 895 ms
Did a real search return anything?
Returned results · 77981 results for the sample query · median 2.4 s · stable across runs
Sample query: Los 7 lugares más terroríficos del Universo Conocido
Benchmark coverage
Found 5 of 5 test items (100%) in the Video / audio / music cluster. Median response 560 ms.
By how well known the item is: 1/1 well-known, 3/3 mid, 1/1 obscure .
One item it found: Los 7 lugares más terroríficos del Universo Conocido
Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required, see the API tag).