YouTube Recall by Two Scheming Eunuchs

YouTube tells you "Video unavailable" and nothing else. This add-on tells you what the video actually was.

On a private, deleted, region-blocked or age-gated video it adds a panel to the player area with the recovered title, channel, publish date, duration and thumbnail. When more survived, the view and like counts and the description are there too — and when someone has archived the video itself, it links to that copy.

HOW IT WORKS

First it checks things that are instant: the page's own data, and optionally your browsing history, which often still holds the title of a video you watched before it disappeared. If that finds an answer, you get it immediately, and the slow archive search waits for you to start it with a button.

If not, it searches the Wayback Machine and archive.org, showing what it is checking and what each source found, with a button to stop. A first lookup can take 10-30 seconds, because archive.org is slow. Results are cached, so coming back to that video answers instantly, and you can see and clear the stored results in the add-on's options.

WHAT IT SENDS

Only the video ID of the page you are looking at, to archive.org and web.archive.org, to look up an archived copy. There is no analytics, no telemetry, no advertising, no tracking and no server of our own, and nothing identifies you. If you turn on the optional history or bookmark lookups, those are searched on your own machine and never leave your browser.

FIRST RUN

Firefox does not grant site access when the add-on is installed. If the panel does not appear, allow access for youtube.com, archive.org and web.archive.org in about:addons.

Not affiliated with YouTube, Google, or the Internet Archive.