Reddit-Shorts-Bot

A program to upload auto generated videos from Reddit threads to YouTube via the YouTube Data API v3

This is an improved version of a prior project where I had slightly modified the RedditVideoMakerBot to enable automatic uploading. The major improvement is that no alterations have to be made to the source code of the RedditVideoMakerBot, so this program can still be used even as that repository is updated further, provided the current directory structure is kept.

Requirements

A clone of the RedditVideoMakerBot repository is required as it will be doing the video generation

Furthermore needed are following packages:

• oauth2client
• google-api-python-client
• httplib2
• python-dotenv
• tomli

These are also listed in requirements.txt and can be installed with pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup

1. Clone the RedditVideoMakerBot repository
2. Follow the installation guide for the RedditVideoMakerBot
3. Test the RedditVideoMakerBot to make sure it works
4. Rename .envTEMPLATE to .env and specify the path to your clone of RedditVideoMakerBot within
5. • Create a project in the Google Cloud using the YouTube Data API v3 ¹
   • Rename client_secretsTEMPLATE.json to client_secrets.json and configure the marked fields with the information from your Google Cloud project
6. Run the program, on first usage, you will be asked to authorize the project by Google for a Google (YouTube) account

sidenote: the o-auth token created in step 6 of will expire every so often, meaning when this happens you will be prompted to reauthorize your google account

Usage

Navigate to your clone of the repository and in the command line execute :

$ python main.py

The standard title of the uploaded video will be r/[SUBREDDIT]: THREAD_TITLE. For example r/AskReddit: What profession do you find unhealthy. If you want to specify a title other than the auto generated one you can specify it like this:

$ python main.py "title"

Make sure to use quotation marks ("This is a title") if you want to include spaces in your title

Occasionally after successful video creation the upload / verification process will fail, in this case you can re-call the program like this:

$ python main.py --retry

to attempt to upload the latest video again, this will avoid having to go through the slow video creation process again.

Notes

The upload happens through the YouTube Data API v3, after setting your account up in the google cloud you have an API quota of 10,000 / Day. Uploading a video costs 1600 points, so in a day you can upload a maximum of 6 videos.

Footnotes

1. The individual steps for 5. haven't been explained in detail as that would be complicated to follow. For a good explanation of the individual steps I recommend this video from 4:17 to 11:05. Once you have your client ID and client secret, you can configure your client_secrets.json like in the next substep. ↩