video-archive
YouTube via Wayback Machine
A recovery technique rather than a separate site: looking up old captures of YouTube watch pages in the Wayback Machine to retrieve the metadata, titles, and thumbnails of deleted or changed videos. You check whether a capture exists via the Wayback availability API, then open the archived page itself. Coverage is limited to the watch URLs the Wayback Machine happened to save, and you usually recover the page rather than the playable stream, pair it with Filmot or Ghostarchive when hunting a lost video.
Why it’s useful & how it works
When a YouTube video is deleted or taken down, its watch page sometimes lives on as a Wayback Machine snapshot, preserving the title, description, upload date, view count, and thumbnail. You look up a video by its ID or full URL: Echo checks whether a capture exists and, if so, links you directly to the archived page. Because the Wayback Machine crawled watch pages rather than video files, you usually recover the metadata rather than a playable stream; for the stream itself, pair this with Filmot or Ghostarchive. Coverage is uneven and depends entirely on whether the Wayback Machine happened to crawl the page before it disappeared.
What’s inside
A subset of YouTube watch URLs captured by the Wayback Machine, which has archived over one trillion web pages in total. No separate count of YouTube-specific captures is publicly available.
API access
https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=youtube.com/watch?v= <id> ; CDX
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Server error HTTP 500 11.3 s
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 16.6 s
- API, direct
- Rate-limited HTTP 429 1 s
- API, through a proxy
- Rate-limited HTTP 429 726 ms
Did a real search return anything?
Returned results · median 4.4 s · stable across runs
marker present (count not extracted)
Sample query: 20260822062254
Benchmark coverage
Found 1 of 2 test items (50%) in the Video / audio / music cluster. Median response 1.2 s.
By how well known the item is: 0/1 well-known, 1/1 obscure .
One item it found: 20260226051618
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).