I've stumbled across a few YouTube video lists in the past which were supposed to have soundtracks to a game or a movie but somehow had random videos in-between expected videos (only a few were like that). I wonder if it was a mistake or intentional, or if those videos (being soundtracks) got taken down and after several years were reassigned to new videos. Does YouTube ever reuse video IDs/urls?
Youtube – Does YouTube reuse old defunct video IDs to new videos
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Full Disclosure: I am the lead developer on the site I'm mentioning...
If you can get the URL to the .FLV file (just google 'how to get FLV URL youtube'), Upload by Transfer is what we call it. That feature gets released next week on our platform (see blog post for details). You provide the URL to the FLV, and the cloud service pulls it off and transcodes it.
Edit: Just tried this with the KeepVid suggestion in another answer. Just picked a popular YouTube video... http://play.nimbushd.com/view/lfsv
This is normally meant for production shops with automated workflows (HTTP/FTP servers) but FLV is supported and it's no different. And in the interest of neutrality I suppose you could also do this with encoding.com if you had a destination for it (an FTP server or something).
If you're not looking for a cloud service/hosted platform, then of course there are YouTube downloaders and you can just save the .FLV files off to your hard drive.
You cannot do this from the video player itself, but if you're watching the videos on a Youtube.com page you can add them to an existing playlist or new playlist using the "Add To" button under the video. You'll also have to be logged in to make this button work.
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Best Answer
No, I don't think YouTube ever reassigns old video IDs.
YouTube isn't running out of video URLs any time soon. In his video Will YouTube Ever Run Out Of Video IDs?, Tom Scott calculated that YouTube could generate over 73 quintillion video URLs. For reference, that's 73,786,976,294,838,206,4641 unique possibilies.
So while it's theoretically possible that YouTube is reusing video URLs, it is highly unlikely. Mainly because they don't have any reason to reuse old URLs.
1The number of unique URLs may actually be 18,446,744,073,709,511,616. Either way, it's still a stupidly large number.