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
Availability API clean both ways. Recovers page metadata/title/thumbnail, not always the stream. Pair with Filmot/Ghostarchive.
What’s inside
Subset of youtube.com/watch URLs.
API access
https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=youtube.com/watch?v= <id> ; CDX
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required — see the API tag).