Reddit Video Maker

Generates videos of narrated Reddit articles or compilations of videos from subreddits.

Installation

Debian/Ubuntu

Install the necessary system packages.

sudo apt install ffmpeg imagemagick

Configure ImageMagick by opening /etc/ImageMagick-<VERSION>/policy.xml and commenting out or removing the line that reads

<policy domain="path" rights="none" pattern="@*" />

(This allows us to write text on images and videos. See this comment for more details.)

Install the Python package.

pip install .

Download the corpora used for text processing.

python -m textblob.download_corpora

Example Usage

Setup

Debian/Ubuntu

Navigate to the example directory for generating compilations of videos from subreddits.

cd examples/reddit-video-compilations

Install the fonts this example uses

sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Reddit API Authorization

Sign up for the Reddit API with a registered Reddit account and create an application. See this guide. Then copy the client ID and client secret for the application into reddit_api_config.toml.

YouTube API Authorization

Obtain OAuth 2.0 authorization credentials for the YouTube API through the Google API Console. See this guide. Then download and place your OAuth 2.0 client secrets in client_secrets.json.

Now that OAuth 2.0 is setup, authorize a YouTube account using the authorization script. This account will have a video uploaded to its YouTube channel later in this guide.

./auth.py

Generating a Video

Now we can generate a video. Here we use the configuration profile defined in profile.toml. Words will be censored in the video using words and phrases in censor.txt, and metadata like the video's title and tags will exclude words and phrases in blocklist.txt. All generated files will be placed in the directory output. You will want to populate censor.txt and blocklist.txt with your own words. Here is a list of English swear words and here's a list of demonitized words for YouTube.

./create.py profile.toml -o output -c censor.txt -b blocklist.txt

The underlying video rendered, moviepy, can sometimes mess up the terminal. Use the command reset to fix this (the command may be invisible as you type it).

Uploading a Video

WARNING: Unverified Google APIs services will result in any videos uploaded with it being "locked as private". This can be fixed by

• Setting your API service as "Internal", which requires you pay for G Suite.
• Requesting an audit of your API service, which requires you have a business and pay for G Suite.

NOTE: The following script does not currently upload the thumbnail.

Run the upload script with the created video payload.

./upload.py output/payload.toml

Shortly after, you should see your video being uploaded and processed. This will of course take some time, with time varying based on your internet speed and video size.