unlisted

a tool for digging up unlisted YouTube videos on a channel. it generates random video IDs, checks them against YouTube's oEmbed endpoint, and logs anything that comes back alive.

how it works

YouTube video IDs are 11 characters from [a-zA-Z0-9_-]. unlisted brute-forces that space by generating random IDs, skipping any that belong to the channel's public videos, and checking the rest. if a hit comes back it records the title, URL, and author.

heads up: the ID space is 2^64, so hits are rare and depend on luck. oEmbed also answers for public videos, so in --open mode a hit is any existing embeddable video, not necessarily an unlisted one. videos with embedding disabled aren't detected.

requirements

• python 3.10+
• poetry

install

git clone https://github.com/thefr0gg/unlisted
cd unlisted
poetry build
pip install ./dist/unlisted-*.tar.gz

usage

dig a specific channel

unlisted dig --channel-identifier LinusTechTips --threads 7

pass the channel handle (a leading @ is ignored).

open search (all channels)

unlisted dig --open --threads 5

no channel filter — logs every valid unlisted video it finds regardless of who uploaded it.

resume a previous run

unlisted dig --channel-identifier LinusTechTips --ignore-uids-from-result ./unlisted-dig-results-LinusTechTips.json

pass the result file from a previous run and it'll carry over the videos already found (and skip the channel's known public videos). randomly generated IDs aren't stored, since repeats are statistically negligible.

all options

flag	description	default
--channel-identifier	channel handle to target	—
--open	search across all channels	false
--threads	number of worker threads	3
--delay	ms between requests per thread (helps avoid IP blocks)	500
--status-interval	seconds between progress lines (0 disables)	10
--output	path to save the result file	./
--ignore-uids-from-result	result file to resume from	—

results are saved to a JSON file in the output directory and auto-saved every 30 seconds while running. press Ctrl+C to stop cleanly.

license

GPL-3.0