Find Your Lost Google Videos

Close up of squares of binary code on a digital plane stacked on top of each other.

When Google announced it was shutting down Google Video in 2011, that left untold numbers of videos in internet limbo. 

On this week’s Reveal, we are telling a very different kind of story: investigations into questions that might be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but matter quite a bit to one person. We went looking for an old short film, made by Garrison Hayes, that disappeared when Google Video shut down.

During our investigation, we learned that a group of volunteers banded together to save millions of the videos and their metadata, and the Internet Archive donated storage. That means if you assumed your old videos are gone—you might be wrong. And we have instructions to help you check.

That data—including the Internet Archive URLs from which you can download your video—exists in a massive text file at archive.org. If you’re a programmer, you can use whatever scripting language you prefer to parse the text. Otherwise, the next steps are easiest if you are familiar with word processors.

  1. At the link, your download options are .7z or torrent. If you’re unfamiliar with torrents, you can download the .7z file, which is a compressed version (like .zip). Once you’ve extracted the file, you’ll find a CSV, but it’s too big to open in programs like Excel. The fastest option, if you aren’t a programmer, is to download a free integrated development environment (IDE) like Sublime Text, better suited for opening large files. Be warned that it’ll take a long time for the program to load the file.
  2. From there you can use the find feature to look for whatever keywords you can remember: from the title, description of the video, the email address you used or the original filename. Once you’ve found the line in the file related to your video, you’ll want to look for the old URL where Google hosted it. It contains “googlevideo.com/videoplayback” and, nearly 90% of the time, starts with something like “http://v8.cache7.” To see the video the text is referencing,  put that URL you’ve found at the end of https://web.archive.org/web/20041231235959id_/ in your browser’s address bar. It should look quite long!

Example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041231235959id_/http://v1.cache5.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?id=5e903bf24b25e80d&itag=5&begin=0&ip=0.0.0.0&ipbits=0&expire=1309659155&sparams=ip,ipbits,expire,id,itag&signature=437990DFE530EA5FF22DDB2882240B5259AE749B.3C6C29148F23B4E28576C57014D57B7A0D500639&key=ck1&redirect_counter=1

A text editor window showing the contents of a CSV file and the search interface, with the search term 'cat' highlighted and a rectangle around the video URL.
This is what one line in the file looks like in Sublime Text, which is denoted as an individual line through the numbering in the left sidebar. Note that the search is not case sensitive by default. The text outlined in red is how a typical video URL appears.

You can also make a copy of this Google Sheets file and use it to automate the new complete URL. Double- or possibly triple-click the line of text for your video to easily get all of it, then copy and paste it into the first column. Just make sure you get the whole line (starting with a negative sign and a series of numbers) if you want the metadata like the email address, title, and description parsed!

Some notes about the archive:

About 92% of the videos have an associated date they were uploaded: Of these, all but two were uploaded between November 11, 2005 and October 26, 2010 (Google had stopped allowing upload before it ended hosting entirely). The last two were reportedly uploaded October 8, 2012 and February 4, 2011.

Find Your Lost Google Videos is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.