Comment by Jugurtha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jugurtha | Hacker News Reader

Tangential to this: I started uploading videos to YouTube recently. I was amazed by the fact some trivial things are not possible.

For example: I uploaded videos to my account, and then wanted to transfer the videos to another account. This is not possible. I have to download the already uploaded videos, then upload them again to the new account.

Second: in the Contents view of Studio, there's no way to know if the videos are in a channel, so I selected videos and added them to a channel. Result? The operation is not idempotent. The channel now contains several references to the same video.

This is unfucking believable, as the product has existed for ages and there's no way I'm the only one to have this problem. The worst thing is that, the documentation and all the guids on the internet casually tell you to re-download the videos, and then upload them to the channel. How on earth this flow seemed acceptable is beyond me.

Now, the next step obviously was to sort the videos in the channel by duration or name so I could quickly find the copies and remove them, right? Wrong. You can't sort videos by name or duration, only by upload date or publication date. What in the name of fuck.

If I had time, I'd make a service to do just that. Based on the tutorials and questions and answers on reddit that find it totally normal to re-download videos that are already uploaded in order to upload them again, this is insane.

Is this problem actually solvable? As in, does YouTube expose an API for doing the things you're talking about? If not, then there's really not much anyone can do about it.

>Is this problem actually solvable? As in, does YouTube expose an API for doing the things you're talking about?

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3

The description from the above link:

With the YouTube Data API, you can add a variety of YouTube features to your application. Use the API to upload videos, manage playlists and subscriptions, update channel settings, and more.

>If not, then there's really not much anyone can do about it.

If their API is unusable, then follow the steps in the documentation, only let a computer do it. Use OAuth to authenticate with the service, access user's content that may be public, private, or unlisted.

On a user operation, say move videos from one account to the other, in the backend: download the videos to temporary files using a third party tool that I will not mention here, then upload them to the new account.

If you want to skimp, mount the user's Google Drive account to store the videos temporarily (as a buffer), and then from their Google Drive to their YouTube account. This way you don't pay for storage and are scalable right off the bat. Then build everything on top of Google App Engine : D Except you'll have a harder time doing the mount operations if you're on GAE, I suppose.

So you only receive requests, mount Google Drives, download videos there, then the videos to the user's account/channel.

Yes, you could eventually use something "in-memory", but if you have a lof of requests, you'll have to account for that RAM, hence using the user's Google Drive account.

Again, I'm thinking of this off the top of my head, but I think it checks out.

The user only has to select the videos from the source, and choose a destination, click OK, done. Go for coffee or something, instead of downloading them and good luck for people with crappy internet to do that. Future versions may enable you to do CRUD on the videos on a usable interface, not like the Studio thing. Display accounts and channels and playlists like folders and move videos around like you'd do on a file explorer, etc.

I may do that once to transfer my videos.

Your bio is "Serial Side Project Maker"... :P

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