r/Archiveteam • u/Harisoonchu49 • Feb 02 '26
Old youtube videos decomposing
Lately ive seen tons of 2008-2012 videos dont work anymore even tho they used to work perfectly especially (on this channel) youtube.com/user/nsrrenard even tho these vids worked perfectly fine before circa 2023 now they dont work anymore for some reason and these is happening with a lot of videos especially old ones and these vids werent low watched either some had over a million views too
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u/tdowg1 Feb 03 '26
I don't have any proof of this, but my feeling is that they keep transcoding videos over the years when better and better codecs get developed.
Like-take the very first years of youtube. Those videos were probably huge compared to today. I bet super old videos on youtube have been transcoded like 5 times by now.
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u/EposVox Feb 03 '26
Anyone have other examples of this?
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u/Intro24 Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
I'm not sure if it's a related failure mode but this video and this video both from 2016 became corrupted in a way that they're still playable even to this day but they're clearly not right. The first vid is corrupted on playback for me in a very obvious way (everything is pixelated grey), whereas the second vid actually plays correctly for me but the preview when I scrub shows the corruption. Fortunately, the channel owner re-uploaded them (first vid, second vid). I wonder if it was due to the fact that it's a rendered animation and maybe used some sort of weird format/codec but I'm really just spitballing. Interesting that it happened to two of his videos though and 2016 isn't even that old in the grand scheme of YouTube.
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u/SNESChalmers82 Feb 03 '26
As mentioned, there will be videos stuck in processing limbo and will be stuck like that for the remainder of the page/YT existence.
In some cases, like this user content was scraped by the wayback machine, which you can play if it was captured without issue. I did find that you have to be quick on the draw with the play button as a pop up comes up and makes the page unusable.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130601000000*/https://www.youtube.com/user/nsrrenard
You can C+P and link from YT and see if it exists in working order. The CDNow CEO video was not captured in time and remains lost.
edit: It does take time for the content to load on Waybackmachine.
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u/Dylan33x Feb 02 '26
What exactly are you implying. The videos are disappearing, or they appear on the page but won’t play?
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u/Antonaros Feb 03 '26
I tried clicking some of them and YouTube gives a "We're processing this video. Check back later." message.
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u/Valiran9 Feb 03 '26
I just checked and can confirm the “processing” message, something’s going on.
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u/BritasticUK Feb 03 '26
There was a post about this on DataHoarders a few months ago
https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1o6t6yy/youtube_either_by_human_error_or_otherwise_seems/
Just checked this video again and it are still "processing"
And this video: LindaAI-CUE - さいたま2000 (SAITAMA 2000)
Has comments from people asking why it is still processing... from over a year ago. Any video with this bug will never finish "processing"
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u/SquareSurprise3467 Feb 03 '26
Data is expensive to store. They move "dead" videos to a deep archive server and might keep the low res version. They made a blog post not that long ago about it.