Auto post published videos to YouTube channel

[BrashRebel]

WordPress.tv has a YouTube channel here: ​https://www.youtube.com/user/WordPressTV which has never been utilized to date. After some discussion, the WPTV team has come to a consensus that videos published on WordPress.tv would be wonderful to share on YouTube as well. Since YouTube does have an API for posting videos, it is possible for us to implement some functionality that will allow a content to be pushed to YouTube when successfully published on WPTV.

[casiepa]

The old channel ​https://www.youtube.com/wordpresstv should no longer be used.
The official channel ​https://www.youtube.com/wordpress is getting all videos from WPTV of WordCamps happening in 2018 or later with a script that is running locally on a WPTV moderator's laptop (download from WPTV, upload to YouTube).

Better ways will hopefully be implemented soon...

[casiepa]

Switching to YouTube and keep WordPress.tv as archive (and with more info) has been on the list for years. We should start with at least having the YT API on WordPress.tv and decide how to move forward:
1) Use YouTube as uploader and then Moderators sync back to WPTV. (Pro: High quality videos, bulk upload; Con: Extra info missing, no direct link with the event (e.g. WordCamp))
2) Continue with WordPress.tv as frontend and create a routine that pushing the videos after a few hours to YouTube (Pro: Video flow can be handled more easily; Con: The uploader will need a very good code review, basic video quality)
Anyhow, for any 'basic' actions we would start with, the API is needed.

[eidolonnight]

I’ve been looking into this ticket for a little while and wanted to share some work toward at least cross-posting new content from WPTV to YT. I know that this doesn't address a full switch to YouTube, which @casiepa mentions above, but it seems like a possible stop-gap.

WordPress.tv content is valuable and could be a great asset for building our YouTube audience. YouTube itself is huge and could be a growth opportunity for WPTV and Learn content. As such, I've been exploring if I could build a robust solution (one requiring little to no maintenance) using Zapier, an automation platform that maintains several app connectors. The resulting “Zap” looks like this:

1. Zapier checks ​https://wordpress.tv/feed/ every 1-15 minutes (plan dependent).

2. When Zapier detects a new feed item, it grabs the video thumbnail filename and performs a search-and-replace to get the video filename:

   let OUTPUT = INPUT.replace(/_mp4\.scrubthumb.*jpg/, '.mp4');
   

3. Using the video filename and other feed data, Zapier uploads the video, with title, description, and link back to WPTV, to YouTube. Subtitles and other metadata are either not available in the feed or not supported by Zapier’s YouTube connection. This additional stuff does not appear to have been part of the old solution either.

I have this working and posting unlisted videos to my personal YouTube. Step 2 is the weak point here. Unfortunately, the video filename is not available in the RSS feed. My early attempts used the embed URL and metadata available on that page, but this required 4-5 steps or “tasks” in Zapier. Tasks, the steps that take place after a trigger, are part of the Zapier pricing model so this approach would ultimately be more expensive.

So my question is this: Is there any possibility for the video filename to be added to the RSS feed? If not, can the video filename be reliably derived from the thumbnail filename (as shown above)? I've tested with the last half dozen or so posts, and it seems OK, but I'm unsure what format/structure these filenames could take in the future.

[eidolonnight]

Thanks to https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/12044 the original video file is now available via RSS. I'm testing further with this addition and attempting to add auto-categorization.

[eidolonnight]

New content from WordPress.tv, which appears in its RSS feed, is now automatically uploaded to YouTube via Zapier. This content includes videos at their original quality, titles, descriptions, links to the WPTV pages, and tags.

This automation has been successfully posting to the ​WordPress YouTube channel for the last 2 weeks. I've added a page to the ​Marketing Team handbook about the process.

Now that this automation is based in Zapier and managed by the Marketing team, I suggest that any future issues or enhancements be reported in the ​Marketing-Team repo.