YouTube – How to Find Link of Embedded and Unlisted Video

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There is a website sharing scientific courses in video format. They upload videos to YouTube and then embed them in their website. They share their videos unlisted, so there is no explicit way to get the video link. There a lot of videos, and if you want to rewatch one of them, you need to search for it for minutes; the website has no content search feature. I keep a record of my favorite videos in my notes for watching them again in the future.

In order to find link of a video I use this workaround:

  1. Click the "Watch Later" button on the video
  2. Open/sign-in YouTube
  3. Go to my "Watch Later" list
  4. Get the video link from there

Is there a simpler way to do this? A Firefox extension or a userscript maybe?

Best Answer

Whether a video is unlisted has no effect on whether you can get the link from an embed. This instead depends on how they have set up the player. It's possible to hide controls from the embed, which is possible to do whether or not the video is unlisted.

First make sure you have checked all the usual ways of getting the link:

  • The YouTube logo link in the lower right corner. (The most obvious one - almost certainly disabled.)
  • The symbol in the upper right corner which looks like three dots connected with lines. (Only visible when the video is stopped or when you hover the player.) Click that to get a clickable link and a text box that you can copy the URL from.
  • Right clicking the video might give you a "copy URL" option.

YouTube embed: ways to get the link

Assuming all of those don't work, there are of course various ways you can get the link from the source code. If you tell me more about the site, I can write a bookmarklet which does this for you. What I need to know: Does the site use frames? Which embed code does it use? New (iframe) or old(embed/object)? Could you post a sample? Can a single page have more than one video?

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