YouTube Video Uploader

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Uploads a video from a URL to your own YouTube channel using the official YouTube Data API. It sets the title, description, tags, hashtags, privacy, schedule, and an optional custom thumbnail in one run. Built to be the publish step of an automated video pipeline (render somewhere, drop the file on a CDN, point this actor at the URL), but it works fine for one-off scheduled uploads too.

How it works

You give it a public URL to the video file and your Google OAuth credentials. The actor downloads the file to its temp disk, authenticates with your refresh token, and calls youtube.videos.insert (followed by thumbnails.set if you passed a thumbnail). Nothing about your channel is stored beyond the run.

Try it free (sample mode)

Run it without any credentials to get one clearly-labeled _demo sample row showing the exact output shape — a free preview, no upload performed and nothing charged. As soon as you supply real OAuth credentials (or YouTube cookies for the browser method) it performs a real upload. You can also force the preview with the demoMode checkbox.

Input

The actor also has a browser method that drives YouTube Studio with exported login cookies. It works locally but tends to hit Google's session anti-fraud on cloud runs, so the API method is the default and the one to use for anything unattended. If you do use it, a residential proxy matching your usual country is strongly recommended.

Output

One dataset record per run. The useful fields are videoId, watchUrl (the youtu.be link), privacyStatus (the privacy YouTube actually stored, read back from the API), requestedPrivacy, privacyOverridden (true if YouTube forced a different privacy — usually an unverified project), scheduledFor (null unless you set publishAt), thumbnailSet, and uploadSeconds. ok: true means the insert returned a video ID. A keyless/demoMode run returns a single row flagged _demo: true with a _notice explaining nothing was uploaded.

Example

{
"videoUrl":"https://cdn.example.com/clips/episode-12.mp4",
"title":"How the Roman aqueducts actually worked",
"description":"A short breakdown of gravity-fed water systems.",
"tags":["history","engineering","rome"],
"hashtags":["shorts","history"],
"privacyStatus":"private",
"publishAt":"2026-06-15T14:00:00Z",
"categoryId":"27",
"clientId":"YOUR_CLIENT_ID.apps.googleusercontent.com",
"clientSecret":"YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET",
"refreshToken":"YOUR_REFRESH_TOKEN"
}

Pricing

$0.05 per successful upload. Pay per result, no subscription. Where an AI model is involved you bring your own OpenAI key.

Before your first PUBLIC upload (read this)

Two Google-side requirements catch almost everyone:

1. Publish your OAuth consent screen. New API projects start in "Testing" mode, where refresh tokens expire after 7 days. Move the consent screen to "In production" so your refresh token keeps working. (If a run fails with "refresh token is expired or revoked", this is why.)
2. Verify your project to publish public videos. On an UNVERIFIED Google Cloud project, YouTube forces every uploaded video to private regardless of what you request — this is the single most common reason a "public" upload shows up as private. Request the YouTube API compliance audit to lift this. This actor reads back the privacy YouTube actually stored and, if it was overridden, sets privacyOverridden: true in the output and logs a warning, so you'll know.
3. Quota. As of Dec 2025, videos.insert costs ~100 units; the default free quota is ~10,000 units/day, i.e. roughly 100 uploads/day. Heavier use needs a quota increase.

Notes

You need your own Google OAuth credentials. There is no shared app. Create an OAuth client in Google Cloud Console with the YouTube Data API enabled, then generate a refresh token with the youtube.upload scope.

Errors are actionable

Credential and quota problems return a plain-English message naming the fix (expired refresh token, missing channel, quota exhausted, forbidden/missing scope) rather than a raw stack trace. For the browser method, a failed login/step saves a screenshot and the page HTML to the run's key-value store and references them in the error so you can see exactly where it broke.

Browser method (best-effort)

The optional browser method drives YouTube Studio with your exported login cookies instead of the API. It is best-effort: fresh-context logins from cloud/datacenter IPs frequently trip Google's "verify it's you" checkpoint, so prefer the API method for anything unattended. To use it, export your YouTube session (a cookies array or a Playwright storageState) with a "Cookie-Editor" / "Get cookies.txt" extension covering both .youtube.com and .google.com, or via npx playwright codegen --save-storage, and paste it into cookies. A residential proxy matching your usual country is strongly recommended.