Upload Video on Youtube Using Curl and API V3

Upload video on Youtube using curl and api v3

Unfortunately, we don't have a specific example of YouTube API v3 uploads from PHP available yet, but my general advice is:

• Use the PHP client library instead of cURL.
• Base your code on this example written for the Drive API. Because the YouTube API v3 shares a common API infrastructure with other Google APIs, examples for doing things like uploading files should be very similar across different services.
• Take a look at the Python example for the specific metadata that needs to be set in a YouTube v3 upload.

In general, there are a lot of things incorrect with your cURL code, and I can't walk through all the steps it would take to fix it, as I think using the PHP client library is a much better option. If you are convinced you want to use cURL then I'll defer to someone else to provide specific guidance.

Upload thumbnail to Youtube API using curl

You'll have to use the URL that's on the spec document:

https://www.googleapis.com/upload/youtube/v3/thumbnails/set.

In my experience, the sample code page is not one hundred percent reliable (for example, the Videos.insert API endpoint suffers from the same issue).

You'll have to issue the following curl call:

curl --request POST -v \
  "https://www.googleapis.com/upload/youtube/v3/thumbnails/set\
?videoId=RoZypUhZY04\
&uploadType=media" \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer my_access_token' \
  --header 'Content-Type: image/jpeg'\
  --data-binary '@/Users/adviner/Projects/Prototypes/VendorAPI/source/YouTube/YouTube-BOS.jpg'

Notice that instead of the two -F options (form options), the call above uses one --data-binary option, with its argument starting with @ to indicate that the rest of the argument is a file name.

YouTube API v3 over HTTP POST: can't set snippet while uploading a video (title ends up as unknown)

I was able to get this work in the end only by making 2 API calls - one to upload the video (as a multipart/form-data POST) and getting the resulting ID, and a second to update the video by that ID (as an application/json PUT with snippet in the body).

I started with an HTML form like this:

<form id="upload-yt-video" action="https://www.googleapis.com/upload/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet&access_token=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    <input type="text" name="title" placeholder="Video title">
    <textarea name="description" placeholder="Video description"></textarea>
    <input type="file" accept="video/*" name="videoFile">
    <input type="submit" value="Upload Video">
</form>

That form uploads the video all on its own, and then in JS you can capture the form submission result to get the video ID, then make a second AJAX call in pure JS to update it:

var YOUTUBE_API_TOKEN = 'YOUR_TOKEN_HERE';
var YOUTUBE_VID_CATEGORY_ID = 24; // "entertainment" as an example - note that a category ID is required
var YOUTUBE_VID_PRIVACY_STATUS = 'unlisted';

$('#upload-yt-video').ajaxForm({
  success: function(res, status) { 
    if (status !== 'success' || ! res.id) {
      console.error('problem uploading the video, response status:', status, 'response:', res);
      return;
    }

    console.log('form submission successful, video uploaded to youtube! response:', res);

    updateYouTubeVideo({
      id: res.id,
      token: YOUTUBE_API_TOKEN,
      title: $('#upload-yt-video [name=title]').val(),
      description: $('#upload-yt-video [name=description]').val()
    }, function(err, res) {
      if (err) {
        console.error('problem uploading the video - error while updating video attributes after upload:', err);
      }
      else {
        console.log('video updated! upload complete. response:', res);
      }
    });
  },
  error: function() {
    console.error('form submission failed', arguments);
  }
});

function updateYouTubeVideo(args, cb) {
  if (!args || !args.id || !args.token) {
    console.error('missing args: must at least include id and token');
    return;
  }

  var apiArgs = {
    id: args.id,
    snippet: {
      description: args.description || '',
      title: args.title || 'Video ' + new Date().toDateString(),
      categoryId: YOUTUBE_VID_CATEGORY_ID
    },
    status: {
      privacyStatus: YOUTUBE_VID_PRIVACY_STATUS
    }
  };

  $.ajax({
    type: 'PUT',
    url: 'https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet,status',
    contentType: 'application/json',
    headers: {
        Authorization: 'Bearer ' + args.token
    },
    data: JSON.stringify(apiArgs),
    dataType: 'text',
    success: function(data) {
      if ($.type(data) === "string") data = JSON.parse(data);
      cb(null, data);
    },
    error: function(request, err){
      cb(err);
    }
  });
}

Note #1 - this uses this jQuery plugin to capture the initial form submit.

Disclaimer #1 - I adapted this from a codebase I have that's no longer live, so I wasn't able to test it, so there may be minor typos or bugs in here.

Disclaimer #2 - This worked in September 2014 - there may have been updates to the API since then!

---

Related Topics