Why does the archive.org of most YouTube videos fail with "Sorry the Wayback Machine does not have this video (<id>) archived (or not indexed yet)"?

[cirosantilli]

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/149933/why-does-the-archive-org-of-most-youtube-videos-fail-with-sorry-the-wayback-mac

https://webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4502/why-were-not-customer-support-for-your-favorite-company#comment5091_4503

I have seen several videos which show as archived, and video metadata does show up, but the video itself doesn't with a magic error hacked into the rendered page:

Sorry the Wayback Machine does not have this video (<id>) archived (or not indexed yet).

So does this message indicate:

• a bug in the Wayback Machine?

• they have some more complex algorithm/metric to determine which videos to actually archive or not to save disk space?

• some licensing issue?

• not enough time has passed since the original archive?

  Seems unlikely, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKhs-bHOysY (2018) got first archived in 2018: http://web.archive.org/web/20181111184728/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKhs-bHOysY but as of today 2021, I still get the error.

  I also tried the direct video link https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/CKhs-bHOysY and it didn't work either.

I did however find some videos that still work, e.g.: https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/d81mEbL8Yw8 but it's just too unreliable, I can't predict which ones will work and which ones won't.

So for now I'll have to stick to https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl + reupload when I find a hot video I want to archive.

Related posts:

• https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-used-to-work-on-the-wayback-machine-dont-work-anymore
• https://archive.org/post/1105983/please-help-unable-to-archive-youtube-videos
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/fps7xj/why_cant_i_watch_vids_from_the_wayback_machine/

I really wish they would more clearly indicate what is going on. I love Wayback Machine, but sometimes they are crappy.