YouTube and Twitter APIs
465 words.
An automated YouTube upload script is now working. Hopefully.
I have so much free time in the mornings now! Now that I don’t have to scramble to write and/or post something every day hehe. I don’t really know what to do with myself anymore.
I recently reported some trouble with the YouTube Data API but I’m happy to report that that it’s now working. I’m running an automated script every day which pulls a video file from a directory and uploads it to YouTube.
The bad news is that: 1) You can’t populate the game name field through the API, 2) It’s hard as heck balls to put a video into a playlist through the API for inexplicable reasons, and 3) I haven’t yet worked out a way to easily tie individual video descriptions to video files on disk, so I just have to put a generic description on each video. So I still have to fill in those metadata fields manually, if I care to do so.
Windows does allow you to associate metadata with files on disk, and there’s a “Comments” tag that might work perfectly for holding a video description, but it seems to be limited to 256 characters. Also editing that metadata is a massive pain in the Windows Explorer UI.
The MP4 file format also has metadata tags I could use for holding titles and descriptions, and I have a handy tool called Mp3Tag which is actually quite good at editing said metadata in bulk (despite the old ugly Windows 95 interface), but … I don’t know how to read that metadata from a script yet. Maybe someday. (I vaguely remember finding command-line tools to extract MP3/MP4 metadata in the past. Maybe even ffmpeg can do it.)
Anyway it’s a work in progress. The point is, I don’t have to manually click-type-click-type-click-type-click through the YouTube web site to upload videos anymore. This year, I learned a new term for that kind of labor: “ClickOps.” I thought it was a pretty hilarious and accurate term. It’s soul-crushingly boring and time-consuming, for one thing, and it’s also prone to mistakes.
I also started doing some work with the Twitter API so I could write and/or find a tool to send tweets from the command-line. I thought I’d have to jump through a ton of hoops like I did with the YouTube API, but it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be. You just fill in some information about what you’re going to do, and it auto-approved me in seconds. I assume because I didn’t click any of the boxes that triggered red flags.
UPDATE: I forgot about this, but Mp3Tag is terrible for MP4 files. It takes forever to save changes, so we’re back to square one with the metadata.
Sorry, new comments are disabled on older posts. This helps reduce spam. Active commenting almost always occurs within a day or two of new posts.