How ObscureTube works

The long version of the About blurb.

ObscureTube plays random YouTube videos that almost nobody has watched. Nearly all of them have fewer than 50 views, and plenty have none. Most are home videos uploaded straight from a phone or camera, and each one is a quick glimpse into someone's life, whether it was filmed yesterday or back in 2008.

Where the videos come from

If you upload a video without naming it, YouTube uses the file name as the title. That's why so many of these are called things like IMG 0472 or MVI 1183, and it's how the site finds them: every night it searches YouTube for camera file names and keeps whatever is still under the view limit.

Recent has uploads from the past month, usually found within a day of being posted. Forgotten has older ones going back to 2005, and you can set a date range if you want to see what people were filming in 2009. Videos get rechecked about once a month, so deleted ones drop out, and anything that passes 10,000 views is retired.

Finding 0-view videos yourself

You can do this by hand: search YouTube for a file name in quotes, like "IMG 4821", and filter to uploads from today. It works, but one search at a time is slow, which is why I automated it.

How it compares to astronaut.io and Petit Tube

astronaut.io and Petit Tube (petittube.com) did this first, and both are still around. Astronaut shows a few seconds of each video before drifting to the next, and Petit Tube shows one at a time.

I wanted more control over the experience. Videos play in full, and you can skip to the next one or go back to one you passed too fast. It remembers what you've already seen, and you can block channels you're tired of or stick to horizontal or vertical videos. Any video can be shared with a link. If you miss the astronaut.io drift, turn on auto-skip and choose how long each video gets.

Other details

The next few videos start loading early so skipping is instant. That early load is muted and lasts a fraction of a second, well before YouTube would count it as a view, so browsing here doesn't add to anyone's view count. Everything plays through YouTube's own player, which means the uploader keeps the view, and if they delete a video it's gone from here too.

There's no account. What you've seen and blocked is stored in your browser.

If you find something good, share it in the Discord, or email [email protected]. ObscureTube is also on Reddit, YouTube and GitHub.