How ObscureTube works

ObscureTube plays random YouTube videos that almost nobody has watched. Nearly all of them have fewer than 50 views, and plenty have none. Most were uploaded straight from a phone or camera, some yesterday and some 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 a day or so after they're posted. Forgotten has older ones going back to 2006, 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.

If you only want one kind, there are pages for Shorts, 2000s home videos, digicam, camcorder, GoPro, dashcam, drone and trail cam videos, and one for videos with 0 views.

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. KVN AUST and his viewers keep a long list of file names to try, his YouTube's Recycle Bin map, and a lot of ObscureTube's searches started from it.

How it compares to astronaut.io and Petit Tube

astronaut.io and Petit Tube 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 filter by shape, camera type or view count. 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

There's also Guess the Year, a game where you watch five clips and guess the year each one was uploaded.

The next few videos start loading early so skipping is instant. Everything plays through YouTube's own player, so if an uploader deletes 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. If you have any feedback or requests, feel free to send it to [email protected].