YouTube Subscription Search

Searches all of your subscriptions for new videos, since the last time the program was run, or since 3 days ago. If any videos were found, it will add them to the playlist of your choice.

Requirements

To make sure you have all requirements:

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Create an API key

Before you can run this program, you have to setup a project and API key in the Google Developer's website. This will be used to make all API calls to YouTube using your account information.

Go to Google Developer's website. Login using the same account that your YouTube account is tied to.
Click 'Create', and name your project. You can call it 'YouTube Search' or anything else you wish.
Click 'Library' in the side bar. Search for 'YouTube Data API v3', and Enable. Click back to Dashboard.
Click 'OAuth consent screen' in the side bar. Create a new consent screen, type 'External'. For Application name, you can use 'YouTube Search', or anything else you wish. Level all options as default, and click 'Save' at the bottom of the window.
Click 'Credentials' in the side bar. Click '+ Create Credentials' at the top page and select 'Help me choose'.
For 'Which API are you using?', select 'YouTube Data API v3'.
For 'Where you will be calling the API from?', select 'Other UI'.
Select 'User data', and click 'What credentials do I need?'.
Give a name to your credentials on the next page, and click 'Create OAuth client ID'.
You should be given an option to download, credentials, do this now. This will save a file to your computer, called client_id.json. Click 'Done' after downloading the file.
Copy the client_id.json file into the same directory as the python program. OR you can use the -s option when running the program the first time with the path to client_id.json.

Running the program

Once the client_id.json file has been downloaded and saved to the same directory as the program, you're good to go. Just run ./yt_watch_later.py or python3 yt_watch_later.py.

You don't need to move client_id.json to the same directory, you also use then -s option when calling the program with a path to the file. This file is only needed on the first run, after that, auth tokens will be saved for future runs.

The first time you run the program, you will be prompted to visit a URL and authorize this application. This is normal, and will only be required once. Open the URL in your browser, and follow through the steps on the Google website. You may also get a warning that this app isn't verified. This is also OK since it is using the project you created under your Google profile. Once you have allowed the application to access your data, you will be sent to a page with a code. Copy this code, and paste it into your console and press enter.

Once this is done once, an authorization token will be saved to you computer and used again in subsequent calls of the program.

Also, the first time you run this program, you will be provided with a list of your playlists. You can select which playlist to save videos to be selecting the index number from the list. Just the number. Any other value, and the program will ask you again.

Important Notes

If you ever want to change which playlist videos are saved to, there are two different command line options.
- -p - will prompt you for the playlist to save to, and continue to run.
- -P - will prompt, then exit without searching for videos.
This program will collect information about your subscriptions the first time it runs and use this cached information each time. This is done to limit the amount of API calls it makes to avoid hitting Google API quotas. If you update your subscriptions at any time, such as subbing or unsubbing to channels, you will need to refresh the cached data by using either:
- -r - will refresh subscriptions and continue to run.
- -R - will refresh subscriptions, then exit without searching for videos.
If you want to see a more verbose output and see what the program is doing, you can specify:
- -v - prints more verbose output.
- -d - prints out debug list information as JSON to sys.stderr.

General Usage

usage: yt_watch_later.py [-h] [-s SECRETS_FILE] [-p] [-P] [-r] [-R] [-v] [-d]

YouTube Subscription Search

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s SECRETS_FILE, --secrets-file SECRETS_FILE
                        Client secret file. See README.md on how to get this file.
  -p, --set-playlist    Set the playlist to save videos to.
  -P, --just-set-playlist
                        Just set playlist to save videos to and exit.
  -r, --refresh-subscriptions
                        Force a refresh of subscriptions, and search subs.
  -R, --just-refresh-subscriptions
                        Refresh subscriptions, and do not search subs.
  -v, --verbose         Verbose output
  -d, --debug           Debug output

Cached files

The program will save subscriptions, security tokens and last run information in ${HOME}/.config/youtube_subscription_search (or %userprofile%\.config\youtube_subscription_search in Windows). If you ever decide to uninstall this program, you can safely delete this config / cache directory as well to tie up the loose ends.

TODO

~~Add separate run mode just to edit settings and update subscriptions, without having to do a full search run.~~ v0.2.0 - Added -R switch
~~Add subscription cache date/time, and also automatically refresh after X days since last update.~~ v0.2.0 - Now default, will force refresh every 14 days
~~Add option to customise playlist videos are saved to.~~ - Added in v0.3.0

cpedro/youtube_subscription_search