TubeVault Preserving YouTube's early history
  1. TubeVault
  2. Overview
    1. Features
      1. Hide View Count
      2. Channel Hiding
      3. noindex
      4. Recommend Itself
      5. Redirects
    2. Validation
      1. Channel IDs
      2. Incremental IDs
      3. Video IDs

Video IDs

YouTube's 3DES encryption key was changed at some point in 2006 as YouTube concluded that too many people had access to the encryption secret. As a result, older video archives in the format of index.php?v= use the old ID. However, the older ID links still returned the video page for some time.

As an example, JRNZJ2_fO7Q shows the video "Crushing my camera" with the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwIToyFs2Lc

jwIToyFs2Lc is the post-2006 ID.

TubeVault relies on the post-2006 IDs for placements and there's currently no way to reverse these pre-2006 IDs. As a result, we have been unable to find the placement for certain known videos.

Noteable examples include:

  1. "Welcome to YouTube" by TheDog. The page source of this archive shows the old ID h_aLD8jMc7k. However, there are no known archives* of the video with the new ID.
  2. This blog post by Jones4Carrie links 2 pre-2006 IDs. It's suspected that one of them is for a now-deleted video (2iTQnumR6Is), however this cannot be definitively proven.

*It's claimed that this video shows a playlist with the "Welcome To YouTube!" video. However, the post-2006 video ID is unknown.

The oldest videos are currently tracked here: