A quick video tutorial from SMPFilms, on how to create looping YouTube videos (similar to Vines). The tutorial is unlisted on YouTube.
SMPFilms is a YouTube channel that was launched in October 2005.
Star Wars episode VII The Force Awakens, live panel from Star Wars Celebration (unlisted YouTube video, no spoilers)
The presentation features J.J. Abrams (writer/director/producer) and Kathleen Kennedy (producer) on the Celebration Stage, and are later joined by cast members Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (General Leia Organa), Anthony Daniels (C3PO), and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca). Also brought out on stage are the droids, R2D2 and BB-8.
The live footage doesn’t start until after the 2 hour mark (except for a guy testing a microphone).
Pink Floyd and Brit Floyd (unlisted YouTube videos)
Pink Floyd – The Greatest Gig In The Sky
In 2011, British rock band Pink Floyd uploaded to their channel, a 55 minute long video featuring the previously unreleased live audio recording of their performance of Dark Side of the Moon, at Wembley in November 1974. This unlisted video includes footage of their original Floyd screen films.
Brit Floyd – Live at Red Rocks – 2013 PBS Special
An hour-long PBS special of Pink Floyd tribute band, Brit Floyd, performing live at Red Rocks, on 2 August 2013.
PetitTube
PetitTube is a French website that randomly auto-plays YouTube videos with few or zero views.
It plays a lot of junk (such as real-estate videos), but has been known to bring up some interesting (and weird) videos.
Deep Into YouTube (subreddit)
Deep Into YouTube is a popular subreddit for sharing links to YouTube videos that are old and have few views. A subreddit is essentially a forum on the website Reddit, where the posts can be up-voted and down-voted.
Videos newer than 5 months or with more than 100,000 views are forbidden and automatically deleted.
Many weird, funny and interesting videos are shared on this subreddit.
Alternatives to YouTube
In the English speaking world, YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing site. Despite its huge size, and being regarded as the go-to site for finding videos, there is a lot of user-uploaded video content available on other video sharing sites.
Vimeo and Dailymotion, two common alternatives to YouTube
Vimeo was launched in November 2004, making it a n older video sharing site than YouTube (Youtube was launched in February 2005). Vimeo also had HD video capabilities before YouTube did. Vimeo is often used for more professional looking videos such as short films, independent music videos, and mini-documentaries (especially for embedding in websites).
Dailymotion was released about a month after YouTube. It was developed in France, and is popular in the French speaking world.
Foreign language video sharing sites
There are some very popular foreign language video sharing sites that are almost unheard of by the English speaking monolinguals.
Chinese: Youku, ku6.com, 56.com, Tudou
Japanese: Nico Nico Douga (registration required for watching videos).
German: MyVideo
French: Wat.tv
List of video sharing sites
On L-Lists, there is quite possibly the most comprehensive list of video sharing sites on the internet, with over 120 sites listed:
Hard to find videos on blogs
There are two options for sharing videos on a blog post:
- Embed or link to the video from another site (such as a video sharing site like YouTube).
- Upload the video to the blog (which is an option for some but not all blogging sites).
The former, if on YouTube, would be relatively easy to find unless unlisted or with minimal searchable text and tags. The videos of the latter are harder to find.
Videos on WordPress
Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, also owns VideoPress which is a plugin for WordPress blogs and websites, which allows the hosting/streaming of HD videos. Finding these videos isn’t as obvious as finding a listed YouTube video, given that it works more like a video hosting site (that has no search function) than a video sharing site (that has a prominent and effective search function).
To search for websites which have VideoPress videos, first go to Google, and search for:
search term site:wordpress.com
Then go to the search options, and select videos. Doing so will bring up search results for videos on WordPress sites. It appears that what the search results come up with, are limited to webpages with VideoPress videos, rather than videos embedded from the likes of YouTube (someone please correct me if I’m wrong about this).
The videos appearing this way include websites powered by WordPress but have their own URL. This includes at least several websites for televised American news shows. I am unsure if this includes the sites that use the WordPress software but not the WordPress platform (this blogging resources site has a succinct explanation of the difference).
Videos on other blogging sites
The search results for other major blogging sites don’t seem as good as for WordPress. A search for videos on BlogSpot or Tumblr seems to come up with a lot of webpages that don’t work, webpages with dodgy content (e.g. scams), webpages that contain embedded videos from video sharing sites, or a straight redirect to the video’s YouTube page.
Not all blogging sites are like that though. The video search results for Typepad and Hubpages appear to be limited to videos that have been uploaded to those sites.
Some blogging sites have a search quality somewhere in between i.e. videos that are hosted elsewhere but on uncommon video hosting/sharing sites.
On the list making site, L-Lists, there is this huge list of blogging sites. Not only are there WordPress, BlogSpot and Tumblr, but there also exists over a hundred others. Videos uploaded to the less well known blogging sites would be even harder to find than the VideoPress videos on WordPress (except maybe for some of the blogging sites which have a video search function).
Unlisted Videos – A website for finding unlisted YouTube videos.
Background
YouTube has three main privacy options:
- Public – Videos that will appear in the search results and the video uploader’s channel.
- Private – Videos that won’t appear in the search results nor the video uploader’s channel, that can only be watched by those given permission by the video uploader.
- Unlisted – Videos that won’t appear in the search results (except possibly in playlists) nor the video uploader’s channel, but can be watched by anyone who has a link to the video, or access to a webpage that embeds the video.
The unlisted feature was introduced in 2010, and is often used by major accounts (celebrities, musicians, big businesses etc) for videos such as: live performances, behind the scenes videos, hard to find Easter eggs etc.
Unlisted Videos (unlistedvideos.com)
Unlisted Videos is a website by the New Zealand based company, Statistical Consultants Ltd, that lets people submit, search, and watch unlisted YouTube videos. That is:
- Submit – You can submit the URL of an unlisted YouTube video along with the necessary descriptive content. Unlisted Videos checks to see if it is an unlisted YouTube video, and if it is (and the necessary info has been filled out), it is submitted to the website. Registration is not required for URL submission.
- Search – The submitted unlisted videos can be searched for via the website’s search form. Clicking on YouTube channel names and keyword tags, also takes you to a set of search results.
- Watch – Each of the submitted unlisted videos has its own webpage on the Unlisted Videos website. These webpages will either have that video embedded or a link to the video on YouTube (if embedding isn’t permitted). The video webpages will also have info such as, the video title and description, clickable keyword tags, date of upload (to YouTube), date of submission (to Unlisted Videos), a clickable YouTube account user name (i.e. the username of the YouTube video publisher, that upon clicking will take the user to a list of all videos on Unlisted Videos from that user).
Unlisted Videos have a set of rules and guidelines which are aimed at preventing copyright infringements and privacy breaches. In most cases, the unlisted videos of celebrities, musicians, big businesses, universities etc, are permitted; but the unlisted videos of the average person aren’t.
How to find hard to find videos via a search engine
There are a variety of search engine tricks that can be used to find hard to find videos.
From Site Command
Google and Bing (and some other search engines), have a command which lets the user limit their search to a particular website. The following search would look for webpages containing the word ‘video’ (or maybe some closely related terms) but only from the site wordpress.com
video site:wordpress.com
If you already know that a site has videos, but there aren’t navigation links or a reliable search function to find them, this command can be a good way of finding those videos.
Minus Site Command
While searching for videos on a search engine (especially Google), you are bound to come up with many YouTube search results. The minus sign can be used to exclude terms, and also exclude entire websites. For example:
puppies video -site:youtube.com
You can exclude more than one website in a single search, for example:
puppies video -site:youtube.com -site:vimeo.com -site:dailymotion.com
File Type Command
Some video files are stored and internally linked to in a similar way to a webpage file. Such video files can be found via Google (and other search engines), by using the file type command. This is where you specify the webpage file type. Videos can be found this way by limiting the file type to a commonly used video file extension. For example:
software tutorial filetype:wmv
Some common file extensions include: .wmv, .flv, .avi, .mp4
Quotations and Keywords
Google (and most other search engines) let the user use quotations marks to restrict the search to a phrase(s) as opposed to a collection of independent keywords. For example:
“watch video”
Other Google Search Commands
For other commands, see this list of Google Search commands (a succinct single page list on the list making website L-Lists).
Introduction to the Hard to Find Videos Blog
This blog is about online videos (and also sites, software, tools etc), with an emphasis on online videos that are relatively difficult to find i.e. not YouTube videos that have detailed descriptions, titles, tags etc, that make them easy to find.
These hard to find videos could include:
- Videos from video sharing websites other than YouTube.
- Videos on websites, that were put there by web-admins.
- YouTube videos that lack the descriptive info for people to find easily.
- Unlisted YouTube videos (especially from major accounts).
Hard To Find Videos 