Below is the readme from my GitHub project MRYoutubePlaySubs. If you are part of the #ifollowyouyoufollow me movement on Facebook and elsewhere, this might be of interest.

In short, this is a python script, when given a text file with links to Youtube channels, will automagically play random videos from those channels (without the need of Youtube APIs). The idea was that since we are all trying to be more supportive this might enable us all to discover new content. I will share this post on several pages on posts and hopefully the community will generate better lists with links… Until then, have fun discovering new content, it has been a blast for me!

MRYoutubePlaySubs

This repository contains the script and example text file for playing random videos of random channels. This idea was started by the #ifollowyouyoufollowme movement on Facebook, where artist, musicians, composers, creatives, joined together to increase their visibility during the social distancing of the Covid19 pandemic.

Since the numbers of new subscribers is (potentially) large, I created this script to
play back random videos of all the channels. This was done in an effort to discover new
content. As a side-effect, this should also allow everyone to increase their “minutes” played.

Getting Started

You will need Python 3 installed on your system. Currently this only works for Safari but other browsers (Chrome, Firefox) could be added as options if need be.

For help with your Python installation see Python.org, or use homebrew or MacPorts. If using the package managers, don’t forget to update your PATH (MacOS ships with Python 2 by default, we want to ignore it!).

For MacPorts (what I am using) run the following in the terminal (sudo means you will need to provide your user password):

sudo port install python38

If you installed MacPorts it already updated the PATH in your .bash_profile… you are good to go.

To make sure everything worked:

python3.8 -version

should output:

Python 3.8.2 (in my case)

To use the script we also need to install the selenium package. Run:

~pip install selenium~

~(might need to be pip3 or pip3.8 or whatever…).~

turns out that when installing selenium via pip you cannot use it from the Terminal. So instead use MacPorts again:

sudo port install py38-selenium

Now we should be ready to run the script…

Run the script

You will need a .txt file with a different link to a youtube channel on each line.
It should look something like this:

Each line should contain a single link. Make sure there aren’t any empty lines (although the code should strip them out 🤞).
There is a sample file in the repository you can use to test the script. Either add or replace the entries as needed or create your own…

To run the script, open Terminal:

python3.8 ./MRYoutubePlaySubs.py --links MRYouTubeLinks.txt --numVids 3

This will run the script and using the file supplied with the --links argument. --numVids specifies the number of videos (3 in this case – this is also the default) to play from each channel before moving on to the next on the list.

Optional input: --graceTime adds extra/grace time after a channel is loaded to ensure that all the data we want is fully loaded (default 2 secs).

The script will run indefinitely, so to stop it either:

close the browser window
or ctrl c (in the Terminal)

Only the text file with the links is REQUIRED. The others are optional:
* -l or --links: path to a text file containing links to the channels
* -n​ or --numVids: number of videos to play from each channel before moving on to the next (default 3)
* (optional) -g or --graceTime: extra time after channel load to allow information to be downloaded (default 2)

Usage example:

MRYoutubePlaySubs.py -l TextfileWithLinks.txt -n 2')

or

MRYoutubePlaySubs.py --links TextfileWithLinks.txt --numVids 10 -g 1

For this example, rather than playing the whole video before moving on to the next, I hardcoded it to 5 seconds to show the concept:

As you can see in the video above, you need to enable the Developer Settings in Safari manually (only once unless you turn it off) so selenium is granted access. After that, cd into the working folder, input the information as shown and you are good to go.

You can send me feedback, requests, and suggestions via services@martin-ritter.com or here on GitHub.

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