YouTubeStreamGrabber

Fetch information about YouTube channels and their live streams.

The main motivation behind it was to have a small script to grab a list of livestream URLs in a online tournament setting. I am not sure how this would work with unlisted YouTube streams as I doubt the API will list those.

Requirements

• Python 3
• google-auth
• google-auth-oauthlib
• google-api-python-client

Setup

Once you cloned the repository, you can fetch the required Google libraries with requirements.txt:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Google Cloud Console project

You will need to create a Google Cloud Console project though the GCP Developer Console which has access to the YouTube Data API v3.
You will then need to create a OAuth 2.0 Client in the project and enter its Client ID, Client Secret and the Project ID in the client_secret.json file.

You can use the helper script, getRefreshToken.py, by calling it as-is without parameters, after you filled the fields mentioned above to grab the refresh_token from the callback url. This is the last field you need to fill in the client_secret.json file.

The scripts uses two methods from YouTube's Data API:

• youtube.api.v3.V3DataChannelService.List
  • To grab the livestream information (is the livestream on? If so, what is the videoid?)
• youtube.api.v3.V3DataSearchService.List
  • To grab the channel name for verbosity.

Usage

python youtube_stream_grabber.py -c CHANNELS [-o OUTPUT]

Parameters

• -c CHANNELS: Required. A string or file containing a list of YouTube channel IDs.
• -o OUTPUT: Optional. Output file for the live stream information. If this parameter is not provided, the live stream information will only be printed and not written to a file on disk.

Example

python youtube_stream_grabber.py -c channels.txt -o livestreams.txt

# Checking if DrLupo is live, and getting the stream URL
python youtube_stream_grabber.py -c UCVeW9qkBjo3zosnqUbG7CFw

Credits

• Jeff Noel (https://github.com/JF10R)
• OpenAI ChatGPT