How to find deleted videos in a YouTube playlist, including the ones YouTube hides

The short answer: open the playlist, open its ⋮ menu and choose Show unavailable videos. YouTube keeps unavailable videos out of a playlist by default and leaves a line saying how many are hidden. That option puts them back in place. Deleted videos come back as [Deleted video], private ones as [Private video], and videos that still exist but are blocked for you usually keep their real title. For a deleted video with no title left, take its video ID to a search engine or the Wayback Machine. To do it for every playlist at once, a library tool can list them all together, grouped by the list each one sits in.

Why the playlist says "N unavailable videos are hidden"

A video can stop playing while it sits in your list for three different reasons, and they are not equally final:

• Deleted, by the uploader or by YouTube. It will not come back.
• Made private by the uploader. It might come back, if they make it public again.
• Unavailable to you: blocked in your region, age-restricted, or taken down over a copyright claim, while the video itself still exists.

YouTube used to leave these in place as placeholder rows. On a playlist page today it leaves them out and shows a count instead. People on YouTube's own community forum report messages like "1 unavailable video hidden" with no indication of which video it was.

We measured this on a signed-in account on 2026-08-21 and again on 2026-08-30, since YouTube publishes no help page describing it. A Watch Later that YouTube counted at 40 showed 34 rows, with no placeholder among them. Choosing Show unavailable videos from the list's menu brought the missing rows back, for Watch Later, for liked videos and for ordinary playlists alike. In one 471-video playlist, 52 had been hidden. The rows came back with their video IDs, and the ones that had merely been blocked came back with their titles, channels and lengths.

Finding them by hand

For one playlist, the manual route is:

1. Reveal them. ⋮ menu → Show unavailable videos. The hidden rows appear in their original positions.
2. Read what is left of each one. A [Private video] or blocked row often still tells you enough to search for another upload of it. A [Deleted video] row keeps no title, but its row still links to the video's watch page, and that address carries the video's ID (the part after v=).
3. Look the ID up. Paste the full address into a search engine; a page that ever embedded or mentioned the video may still name it. Or paste it into the Wayback Machine: if anyone archived the watch page while the video was up, the snapshot shows its title.
4. Remove it from the list, one row at a time, if you no longer want the gap there.

This works, and it has a cost: it is one playlist at a time and one video at a time, and it is never finished. Videos keep going unavailable after you check, so a list you cleaned in March has new gaps by summer, and the count on the page is still the only sign of them.

One thing not to trust: whether the thumbnail loads

A tempting shortcut, and one some tools use, is to call a video dead when its thumbnail fails to load. It is wrong in both directions. YouTube's image server keeps answering for videos that are long gone: in our 2026-08-30 check, [Deleted video] rows still got a successful response, just YouTube's grey placeholder image. Blocked videos still get their real thumbnail. Meanwhile an ad-blocker rule or a flaky connection makes perfectly healthy videos look dead. The only verdict worth reading is the one YouTube itself returns about the row.

Every playlist at once

The by-hand route repeats per list because nothing keeps a record of your lists between visits. A local index does. Tubekeep is a Chrome extension that reads Watch Later, your playlists, your liked videos and your subscriptions into the browser, through the YouTube tab you are already signed in to. Any list that is hiding rows then gets a second read through the same Show unavailable videos door. It skips lists where YouTube reports nothing hidden.

What comes back goes to one Unavailable pane:

• Every unavailable video you have, grouped by the list it is in, and marked deleted, private or unavailable, so you can tell the gone-for-good from the might-come-back.
• One entry per video per list. A dead video sitting in three of your playlists is three entries, because removing it is three separate edits. The pane says when that makes its count differ from the number of distinct videos.
• Search YouTube for these opens a search for the selected rows that kept a title, for finding another upload. When a row has no title left, the pane says so rather than pretending it found something.
• Remove from these lists clears the selection in a paced batch, with a confirmation first. It is the one batch in the extension that cannot be undone, since YouTube refuses to put a deleted video back into a list, and the confirmation says so before you press it. Playlists you saved from other people are read-only, so their entries stay.
• Re-scan lists reads them again. The pane is only as fresh as the last read, and it says when that was.

The same videos also stay out of the normal grids, the way YouTube keeps them out of its pages. The difference is that the count is always printed at the top, and an Unavailable filter button shows exactly those rows.

Finding them, reading them and searching for them are free. Clearing them in a batch counts against the free allowance of 500 batch items (removing one at a time never does), and Pro lifts that as a one-time purchase, priced here. The help page covers the pane in more detail under Videos that have gone away.

The bigger loss is the whole list

Rot takes a video at a time. The loss that gets posted to r/youtube is sometimes the whole list:

"Youtube deleted my ~12 year old curated playlist"

Nothing inside YouTube protects against that. A copy outside it does. Tubekeep exports its whole index — lists, which videos are in each, folders — to one JSON file you can keep anywhere, and a file exported before a video went away still holds the title it had then. It is plain text, so you can search it without the extension.

Questions

Q: How do I see the hidden unavailable videos in a YouTube playlist? A: Open the playlist, open its ⋮ menu and choose Show unavailable videos. The hidden rows return to their places: deleted videos as [Deleted video], private ones as [Private video], and blocked ones usually with their real titles.

Q: Can I find out what a deleted YouTube video was? A: Only from somewhere that kept its name, because YouTube replaces the title with a placeholder. Take the video's ID from its link to a search engine or the Wayback Machine, which will show the title if anyone archived the watch page while it was up, or look in a backup of your library made before it was deleted.

Q: Why does my playlist say some unavailable videos are hidden? A: Because one or more videos in it were deleted, made private, or blocked where you are, and YouTube now leaves them out of the playlist page and shows only how many. Show unavailable videos in the playlist's menu brings them back.

Q: Can a private video in my playlist come back? A: Yes, if the uploader makes it public or unlisted again; it keeps its place in your list in the meantime. A deleted video cannot come back, which is why it is worth telling the two apart before clearing them.

Q: Can I undo removing unavailable videos from my playlists? A: No. Putting a deleted video back into a list is an edit YouTube refuses, so there is nothing to undo into. In Tubekeep that batch is marked final in its confirmation, before it runs rather than after.