Youtube CLI

Upoad videos from a CLI. Multiplatform, easy to use, robust programming.

Example:

$ yt.py -t "My Awesome Video" \
-d "My new video has a description! \
You can see more lines of the description here!" \
-p unlisted \
-f videofile.mov

What can this do?

Upload videos and thumbnails with metadata

Installation and Getting API keys

You will need python 3, the google api, and the oauth2client installed. (A pointer, you'll probably want to use pip3 instead of pip to install). You will also need to get a Google API key to access the Youtube API servers.

The code is written in python and is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Why do I have to get an API key, you are the software developer?

You are not allowed to distribute API keys in a reusable method. I would have to violate the Google Developer TOS to include it here. Even if I created a pre-compiled blob to use with the code, the usage would be known due to the open source nature. I would have to provide a fully compiled binary version with obfuscated keys. Not something I'm wanting to do.

Setting up the API keys.

Once you have a client_id and client_secret you can download the JSON from google saving it as client_secret.json in the same directory as the code and it will be loaded automatically during initialization if you use the example script. You can also specify the location of your API key with the --client/-s parameter and place it anywhere.

Login Management

After logging in an Oauth token file is generated in the same directory if a path is not specified using using --token/-k. This is the stored login file that is used to reauthenticate without going through the web login again. You can store and swap different tokens to upload to different Youtube channels, evem brand managed accounts. The token can be transferred to another system to make authenticating headless systems easier.

Script Usage for Uploading

yt.py can upload videos to Youtube. It is a fairly simple file because all of the real functionality is in all the supporting files. You can set video information either over parameters or JSON. You can run ./yt.py -h to see the parameters you can pass. Everything accepts quoted strings except category. That is set with integer numbers(look in videodata.py for what numbers are used). Tags are also able to be set with multiple arguments.

To supply all the video data that is accepted by loading a JSON file as well, load it by using the -l parameter.

You can use both a JSON and parameters. The JSON is loaded first and any passed parameters will overwrite the loaded JSON data.