I’ve always wanted to be able watch old YouTube videos and only old YouTube videos.
Thanks to a GitHub project: https://github.com/ftde0/yt2009 it is now possible to not only watch old YouTube videos easily but use the old website UI as it is a complete front end for 2009 YouTube. This is how my locally hosted instance looks like.
It supports most of YouTube’s functions besides actually interacting with the website such as likes and dislikes and commenting. It even supports embeds meaning its possible to embed a video with the 2009 player with html5 video.
this embed is broken ๐
additionally it has it own algorithm or rather filter and will typically favor or only show era appropriate videos from 2009-2014ish. Overall I’ve been very happy using this frontend its great seeing YouTube how it was meant to be watched. As for complaints it occasionally crashes when searching for things or attempting to load certain videos. I think the issue has to do with codec on some videos and as for the search I have no idea.
If you would like to use it here is a list of public instances you can use. keep in mind they might be slow or crash.https://yt2009.aesthetiful.com
https://old-youtube.com
http://yt20092.giabs.ovh/
these instances no longer work ๐ I recommend you run your own local instance if you’d like to use yt2009
In my experience it seems like yt2009.aesthetiful.com is the fastest of the 3 instances. If you would like to run/install this locally there is a guide on the GitHub and there is a YouTube guide https://youtu.be/OJ8WafIrk-s
