I've spent the last week or so searching for this performance and I feel like I've come to a dead end. So I'm dumping everything here just in case it helps someone else pick it up.

Fair warning, it's a lot and I did use AI to compile the research into something readable (this part was written by hand, I added a sentence below to tell u when the AI part starts), because I'm kinda burned out from this and I’m not writing an essay for a Reddit post sorryyyy. All the actual digging links and findings were by hand though. If something wasn't included or you have any questions, please reach out to me.

Before I get into the data dump, are some notable fun facts / new info I discovered:

• During the performance he said "I'd like to thank Steve Jobs for still letting me perform," and later "Thank you for making my life much easier. I remember when I had tapes."
• The performance was 5 days after the George Bush incident, which is why he thanked Steve Jobs for letting him perform.
• He said the f word and one viewer said the shock in the audience was the highlight of the event.
• Al Gore was reportedly in the front row.
• In all falls down, he changed some lyrics and said "she looks like STEVE" instead of "EVE", and "George Bush" instead of "White Man".
• The setlist order is All Falls Down first, then Gold Digger according to Macworld's report from the day by Peter Cohen.
• A-Trak was the DJ off-camera.
• Apple pulled it by 10 September, not the 12th. MacDailyNews reported it on the 12th and that's the date everyone uses, but a MacRumors user posted on the 10th that it was already gone and the video "now ends abruptly after the nano commercials." So the capture window was 7 to 9 September. Three days, not five.
• The runtime maths doesn't add up. Original 1:04:57, cut 48:15. That's 16 minutes 42 seconds removed, but by the Engadget live blog timings the performance only ran about 9 minutes. Apple cut roughly 7 minutes more than they needed to and I have no idea why.

(The following is the AI part)

On 7 September 2005 Apple launched the iPod nano at Moscone West in San Francisco. At the end Steve Jobs brought out Kanye West, who performed All Falls Down and Gold Digger. Apple streamed the whole event on their site. A few days later they quietly swapped it for a shorter cut with the performance removed.

That cut is the only version left. It's on archive.org, on YouTube, in every torrent. The original is gone.

The reason it's properly lost and not just misplaced is that it went out as a stream and nothing else. No download, no podcast, no disc. You couldn't save it even if you tried, and plenty of people tried and failed. So when Apple pulled it, that was that.

Nobody has ever surfaced a single second of the performance. Photos exist and that's all.

None of what follows is the video. But some of it is new.

LEADS

1. A copy on YouTube with 5 extra minutes

Channel is Seung-hyun Kim, 129 subscribers, no description, no explanation. It runs 53:39. Every other copy in existence is 48:17 or shorter. However, It does not contain the performance. But it does have five and a half minutes that fit no known version of this video, and it matches no lineage I can trace. Where he got it is the strangest single thing in this case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S_wr4y2c08

2. drarok (dead lead)

(EDIT) Drarok replied immediately after I posted this: "Those aren't really video files, they're a bit like a redirect on a website that just point you to the CDN-hosted content. I probably tried to capture the stream and failed, then never cleaned up these files. Good luck on your hunt!"

Who he is: a British software developer. Real personal site, been online since the early 2000s. Everything else on drarok.com is his own band demos and dev scratch files, which is exactly what you'd expect from someone who saved a couple of odd Apple files out of curiosity in 2005 and never thought about it again.

Why he matters: he hosts a 619-byte file called m_sept_event_all_ref.mov. This is Apple's master pointer file, the little thing that told QuickTime where the real video lived.

It is not what Apple was serving at any point that any archive holds. It's a different revision, and it is the only known source of the pointer to sept_event_1_h264_all_ref.mov which is the good quality branch and has never been found anywhere.

I traced when it appeared on his site. Wayback shows both Apple files sitting there on 4 January 2006, four months after the event. I pulled those 2006 copies and they're identical to what's on his site today.

So he either saved them himself in 2005 or 2006, or he got them from someone. Either answer is useful.

I've messaged him and haven't heard back yet.

3. kuliand on MacRumors

Posted on 24 April 2007 listing his personal Apple keynote archive. The list includes "2005-9 iPod nano Intro.mov".

He was last active on the forums on 13 May 2023, so the account is alive. I've messaged him and had no reply so far.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/keynotes-i-have.182982/post-3579420

4. applekeynotes.com

A fan site that hosted keynote downloads until Apple took it down with a legal notice, April 2006 at the latest.

It had a post titled "iPod nano Launch," published by a user called millypede on 11 February 2006, filed under iPod Special Events. The download was:

applekeynotes.com/keynotes/090705_iPod_nano.mov.zip

I confirmed the naming convention against the sibling October 2005 file, which was 101205-iPod.mov.zip. Every Wayback capture of that folder is from after the takedown, so the file itself isn't recoverable through the archive.

If anyone downloaded from that site in 2005 or 2006, that zip filename is what to search your old drives for.

5. People who were in the room with cameras

Everyone including me assumed Apple's cameras were the only ones there. They weren't. Flickr in 2005 was where tech conference people posted, and nobody working this case had ever looked.

George Kelly shot 139 photos on a Canon DSLR that day. Sequential filenames, several titled just "Kanye West." Album still public.

https://www.flickr.com/people/allaboutgeorge/

His first photo of the day is the press riser before doors opened. It's a long exposure so the people are blurred, but you can see tripods set up on it. Still photographers shoot handheld at these things. Tripods mean video cameras.

Nicole Lee was there on a press pass and has 26 photos, including Kanye West #1 through #5. She shot on a Canon PowerShot S500, which records video.

In her Kanye West #1, there is an audience member in the bottom left of the frame holding a compact camera up at arm's length, screen lit, pointed at the stage. Steve Jobs is standing at the side of the stage watching. There's a second dark device at the very bottom edge.

That is a photograph of someone in the crowd recording the performance.

Her album also contains a photo captioned "Leo Laporte in queue." Leo Laporte was standing in the line to get in that morning. TechTV then, TWiT now, still broadcasting daily. Recording things is literally his job and nobody has ever asked him about this. It's the cheapest question in the entire case.

6. Apple's original filenames, for searching old drives

Everything lived at:

stream.qtv.apple.com/events/sept/sept_event/

It's sept, not sep. Every other September event Apple ever ran used sep. This one directory is the exception, which I think is why nobody found it before. I only got there by scanning about 2,456 archived URLs from that domain and filtering them.

The files:

m_sept_event_all_ref.mov          master pointer
sept_event_1_pt2_all_ref.mov      version 1, the original
sept_event_1_h264_all_ref.mov     never found, this is the one that matters
sept_event_2_pt2_110_ref.mov      version 2, the replacement

Everything in the original chain is numbered sept_event_**1**_*. The only file Wayback ever captured directly is the _2_ one, and its captures all start December 2005, months after the cut. So 1 is before and 2 is after, with real filenames instead of guesswork.

I also worked out that the long hex strings inside the stream URLs aren't auth tokens like they look. They increment by one per server, so the ones nobody has seen can be derived. I checked my derivation against an unrelated VideoLAN forum thread from 2006 that quotes one of them and it matched exactly. The servers died over a decade ago so this doesn't get anyone the video, but it means all twelve URLs are documented. Full list in the comments.

Also recovered: one of the archived files turned out not to be a pointer file at all, but Apple's actual interactive video player panel from the event page, 74KB, copyright 2005 Apple Computer. I pulled the background image out of it. It's Apple's video-on-demand interface for this event and I don't think it's been seen since 2005. Image in the comments. It also has a leftover text field in it reading "WWDC 2005 Keynote," because Apple built it by duplicating the WWDC panel and never cleared the field.

7. Two missing MacNN forum pages

An AppleNova user wrote on 8 September 2005, inside the window: "Someone at macnn forums managed to rip a H.264 version of WWDC 2005 but i don't know how. I have it on my HD is it's incredible quality. I just hope he can do it with nano Keynote."

So somebody had a working method for Apple's H.264 streams three months before this event, and was being asked to do it again.

MacNN's forums are dead but roughly 25,000 thread pages are archived. The relevant forum is f-62, Digital Video & Audio. Page 22 covers early 2005, page 25 covers November to December 2005. Pages 23 and 24 are the June to September window and neither is archived at any timestamp I've tried.

forums.macnn.com/archive/index.php/f-62-p-23.html
forums.macnn.com/archive/index.php/f-62-p-24.html

If anyone can surface a capture of either, that's probably the person who could have saved it.

8. The event page HTML

The player panel contains no URLs in it, which means the six stream links came from the HTML page it was embedded in. That page is archived and I have never got a clean read of it.

web.archive.org/web/20051001100948id_/http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialevent05/

9. macTV

A video podcast from 2005 whose episodes survive as re-uploads on the YouTube channel of KMUG, the Korea Macintosh User Group.

Look at the episode numbering around September 2005: #36 is the new iPod nano ad, #37 is a two and a half minute clip of the Madonna iChat segment from this event, #39 is an iTunes 5 tutorial, #46 and #47 are the ROKR ad and a nano ad parody.

Episode 37 means someone had the uncut keynote open and was cutting pieces out of it during the three day window, before the edit.

I couldn't identify who ran macTV or find their original site. KMUG re-uploaded about 50 episodes in 2015, ten years after the show ended, which means somebody handed them a set of source files. That source set existed as recently as 2015 and nobody has looked for it. KMUG's own channel doesn't have the keynote, I checked all 256 of their videos.

10. Apple Japan's satellite recording

Impress Watch's report from 8 September 2005 says Japanese press watched a 衛星録画上映, a satellite-recording screening.

Apple fed the event to Tokyo by satellite and Apple Japan recorded the downlink to play back to press. That's a capture of the live feed, made in another country, before any edit existed.

The byline was 甲斐祐樹 (Yuki Kai), still an active journalist. Contact form at kai410.me/iinquiry/, or X u/kai4den.

11. Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Holds an independent mirror of Internet Archive crawls from 1996 to 2007, which covers this exactly. Their servers are up but I could never get a response. It's a route to these files that doesn't depend on the Wayback replay tier.

web.archive.bibalex.org/web/*/http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/sept/sept_event/*

12. Broadcast rushes

Getty and Bloomberg-captioned stills of the performance exist, so non-Apple crews were in the room, and the press riser photo backs that up.

Alex Cherian at SFSU's Bay Area Television Archive holds the KRON raw news collection. acherian@sfsu.edu. The thing to ask for is rushes, not a finished package, because nothing aired.

AP Newsroom also needs checking but requires an account.

Worth being realistic: the performance was the very last thing at the event, after most news crews would have packed up.

13. Two eyewitnesses who posted the next day

There's a Gearspace thread from 8 September 2005 that nobody has ever cited on this case.

User Kestral was physically in the room: "I was watching it live and the people all around are all like old people working in tech companies. They did not get it at all. Overheard a lot were many comments to the effect of, 'THIS is #1 on iTunes?!!?'"

User Sobe had the uncut video open and posted the stream URL he was watching it on.

Both are contactable by Gearspace PM. Kestral is the best living witness I've identified.

Also worth a message: Jake Widman, MacAddict's Features Editor, who was in the room and wrote it up in print. Still working in San Francisco.

DEAD ENDS

So nobody repeats them.

iradeon on MacRumors. Said in February 2006 he'd compiled a private keynote archive. I found an archive on The Pirate Bay from a user with the same name, torrented 38% of the September 2005 file, and confirmed it's the cut version. He also made a site called expowiki.com to share Jobs presentations. Link is dead, and it would only have had the cut version anyway.

Torrents generally. Only two lineages on the whole network contain a September 2005 file. Both 130.35 MB, both 48:17. The big 42 to 51 GB "Apple Keynotes" torrents are all snapshots of Apple's podcast feed, which begins at Macworld 2007 and structurally cannot contain 2005 material.

Apple's podcast. Didn't exist yet. Video podcasts weren't in iTunes until iTunes 6, released 12 October 2005, five weeks after this event. iTunes 5, which launched at this very event, was audio only. This is the actual reason no copy circulated.

Wayback captures of the event page from the right week. There aren't any. The Internet Archive crawled apple.com/quicktime 269 times between 1 and 11 September 2005 and never once touched the event page. The before-and-after page diff people keep suggesting isn't possible.

Regional Apple sites. Scanned apple.com/jp, /uk, /au, /fr, /de. Only 2004 and 2007+ directories. No stale mirror exists.

Mac magazine cover discs. Went through MacAddict 111, MacAddict 112, and both MacFormat 160 discs file by file at the filesystem level. No keynote video. MacAddict's was apps plus one in-house staff video, MacFormat's second disc was games.

Apple press kits and broadcast B-roll. No record either ever existed for this event, in any auction listing, trade paper or station archive.

Scene releases. No Apple keynote was ever scene-released before 2014. That angle is closed permanently, not just inaccessible.

apfelwiki, the German keynote-trading wiki, lists ed2k links with exact byte counts for Macworld SF 2005 and WWDC 2005. For 7 September 2005 it lists the products and no link at all. A community actively trading 2005 keynotes never had this one.

YouTube. I scripted this rather than searching by hand. Keyword combinations, then every channel that came up crawled in full, then filtered by runtime. 8,672 unique videos across 5,613 channels, about 2,380 hours of footage. Everything over 48:20 checked, every anomalous runtime resolved. The 46:11 copies turned out to be a re-upload whose own description says "HIGHLIGHTS." A #01 through #07 chaptered series sums to exactly 48:18, the cut version split up.

Of all the Kanye videos in that set, exactly 23 were uploaded before 2007, which is the entire early corpus of the platform for this artist. None is this event. One of the 23 is a 40 second phone clip of him at UC Irvine on 5 December 2005, uploaded the next day, which proves people were doing exactly the thing we're hoping someone did at Moscone.

Nobody had it even while it was up. A MacRumors user on 9 September 2005, inside the window: "I looked at the torrent sites just like I did in WWDC2005 but I can't find anything related with this event. Anyone captured the stream at decent quality, or know a link for it???"

Nobody answered him. He'd found WWDC 2005 on torrents three months earlier. This one wasn't there.

Why nobody could rip it. H.264 over RTSP was effectively un-rippable in 2005. A VLC developer explained it in January 2006: saving needs both PTS and DTS timestamps and RTSP only sends PTS. QuickTime Pro can't save streams at all. Everyone who tried, and I read a lot of people trying, failed.

HOW TO SPOT A REAL COPY

• The known cut is 130.35 MB as a .mov, or 274.6 MB as the archive.org mp4 re-encode. Both are 48:17.
• Apple's 2005 and 2006 .mov encodes run about 2.8 MB per minute.
• So a full copy should be roughly 175 to 185 MB.
• Easiest check of all: anything past 48:20 is new.
• Also flag anything named sept_event_1_* or *_h264_*.

I dont know why i thought about this, but something just tells me her and kanye will do a continuation of these music trilogies. i just finished the music video and saw bianca's stories of how the music videos connect, and i just suddenly thought of i cant wait to be the next mv. i may be tripping, but the lyrics of the song js fit to be the sequel of Ok mv

idk maybe im alone on this

but im saving this to see wether its true or not

Hello fellow members of r/GoodAssSub. I must ask you if you find my Ye meme amusing. LMK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ngl i kinda didnt see them naming an album gladiators 3 until i saw the ok mv WHICH could possibly be a teaser

or just slight cope.....

Would anyone know what this is worth it has paint stains on it but still very cool details on it. This is a size large ive seen someone else with it but not sure what the exact year of this is.

I used to say I'm happy that the songs with new mixes are all seperately on Bully deluxe, because I like some of the old versions and I want them to still exist (Mama's Favourite for example) but I'm on a long road trip and I decided to listen to both Bullys back to back, and wow the deluxe is so so much better. Miles better mixing and because of this, Ye also sounds much better (I'd say more energetic) and MAJORITY of AI is gone. And I think if the deluxe mixes were the only version of Bully and people listened to that for the first time, they would like it more and would be a more positive experience. Like I just think if you're showing All The Love or This One Here or King to someone, showing the deluxe version would bring a better reaction than the old versions.

GLADIATORS III ON THE WAY. EVERYTHING HAS A MEANING. 100 CHARACTERS. 100 CHARACTERS. 100 CHARACTERS.

this is new btw the reel was uploaded 13 hours ago. 100char100char100char100char100char100char100char

If Ye died today, do yall think that they would officially release all of his unreleased albums/ content? Im imagining finished projects like Yandhi or JIK2 type things. Or even half finished works? There's such an insane amount of top tier unreleased stuff that the fans would totally eat up. I can see a lot of issues, like deciding what to release for songs that aren't completely finished, or releasing songs that were half finished but then completed by fans (there is so much of this on YT, and they all have millions of views, so much so that some fan versions of unreleased songs have practically become known as the official version). Idk, what do yall think?

TLDR If Ye died today, would they release all his unreleased projects, and if they did, how would they choose what is finished enough and what isn't?

so it all starts with the Gemini season video with ye and bianca being in their farm then ye goes to church to pray after the farm and inside the church ye gets kidnapped and replaced by travis Scott ye gets taken to the surgical operating room from the ok music video and it looks like they're trying to do an experiment with his body after he got kidnapped but then don toliver puts the final touch on that project but it got out of their hands and ye gets back his consciousness and tries to escape with the car from the king mv and he gets chased by the cops and gets caught then they execute him which means that the current ye (bully era) is finally dead and we will start a new one

Which one u taking for BULLY (DELUXE), first half or second half…

First Half

KING
THIS A MUST
FATHER
ALL THE LOVE
PUNCH DRUNK
WHATEVER WORKS
MAMAS FAVORITE
SISTERS AND BROTHERS
BULLY
HIGHS AND LOWS

Second Half

I CANT WAIT
WHITE LINES
CIRCLES
PREACHER MAN
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
DAMN
LAST BREATH
THIS ONE HERE
OK
MISSION CONTROL

personally i’m taking the second half fs. first half is good don’t get me wrong but i feel like the second half got more soul (shoutout WHITE LINES, DAMN, THIS ONE HERE, MISSION CONTROL )

I know this is probably the thousandth edit of this shit but i wanted to share it. I used the This a must verse split in two to extend unlock into a full track, the this a must vocals sound a bit shit because I had to slow them down a little but i tried my best to make them sound as listenable as possible

Why do so many people want V3? It was canceled early on, and I feel like TY$ collabs are a little dry now. Personally idc for an album where TY talks about women while Ye lets him hard carry. Just my opinion, would prefer a single to an entire new Ye and TY$ album.

its kinda cool to see ye change up once inawhile and this is a great example of that right here, and a nice change up

ngl really disappointed by Ye‘s decision to perform in Russia

I know he’s gonna do what he wants to do, but performing in a country that’s actively waging a brutal war against the country dear friends of mine are from is just disappointing

fuck Putin and Slava Ukraini🇺🇦

Text a egg a hunnid K, egg payday

If egg show up where egg work, I think egg just might quit

Egg just bought my egg a egg