YouTube Uploader Pro

YouTube Uploader Pro for Videos: publish long-form to your own channel from a URL

Give it a direct link to your video file and a title. It opens YouTube Studio in a real browser, signs in with your own session, fills in the whole wizard including category, playlist, thumbnail and scheduling, and hands back the video id and the watch URL.

Two things to know before you spend anything. It signs in as you, with cookies you export from your own browser, so the first run takes ten minutes of setup and the risk sits with your channel: driving Studio this way is against YouTube's terms. And YouTube decides some things from the file itself and will not take them back. A square-or-taller clip of three minutes or less is filed as a Short whatever you meant, and a channel that has not been phone verified is capped at 15 minutes and enforces it *after* accepting the whole upload. Both are checked before your file moves.

🎬 What YouTube Uploader Pro for Videos does

It reads your file before it transfers it. Duration, frame size and container come off the first megabyte, so a clip YouTube would file as a Short, or one too long for an unverified channel, is turned away for a megabyte rather than four gigabytes.

Then it fills in Studio properly: title, description, tags, category, playlist, thumbnail, the kids declaration and the schedule. Each one is read back off the page afterwards, so the row says what landed rather than what was asked for. Visibility is the strict one. The run refuses to press Publish unless it can confirm the radio, and saves a draft instead, because a video that should have been private going public cannot be undone.

📥 What you give it

{
  "videoUrl": "https://cdn.example.com/episode-12.mp4",
  "title": "Episode 12: the sugar cubes puzzle",
  "categoryId": "27",
  "visibility": "private"
}

The twelve individual cookie fields underneath are a fallback. Anything in the cookies box wins.

📤 What you get back

One row per run, whatever happens. A published video carries these:

A refusal writes one row too. This is a real one from a real run, with the long messages cut short:

{
  "ok": false,
  "charged": null,
  "uploadFeeCharged": false,
  "errorCode": "SESSION_INCOMPLETE",
  "error": "SESSION_INCOMPLETE: the cookies you supplied do not add up to a Studio session. ...",
  "reason": "The cookies supplied do not add up to a YouTube Studio session. Nothing was uploaded, so no upload fee was charged ...",
  "hint": "Export the WHOLE youtube.com cookie list, not a few fields. ...",
  "platform": "youtube",
  "posted": false,
  "confirmed": false,
  "videoId": null,
  "watchUrl": null,
  "finalUrl": null,
  "diagnosedAt": "2026-08-24T23:32:41.087Z",
  "kind": "video",
  "sourceUrl": "https://httpbin.org/status/403",
  "title": "x",
  "published": false,
  "egress": { "lane": "direct", "attached": false }
}

🧾 Reading the output

The run still finishes as succeeded on a refusal, so read ok and errorCode, not the run status. Codes about your file:

And these are about your session or Studio:

▶️ How to run it

1. Open YouTube Uploader Pro for Videos and put your file where it is served as a file: S3, a CDN, an Apify key-value store record. 2. Export your cookies, following the four rows below exactly. This is the step people lose an hour to. 3. Paste both exports into YouTube session cookies, fill in Title, pick a Category, set Visibility, and start within a few minutes. 4. Read the row: a watch URL on success, an errorCode and a hint on a refusal. 5. After that leave the cookie box empty: the session is saved and refreshed on every run. Paste again only to switch account, or when a run says the session stopped.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.55 per uploaded video, plus $0.02 for each megabyte the run transfers.

Megabytes are counted on every attempt, so a transfer that breaks and restarts can bill more megabytes than the file holds. The upload fee is only charged once YouTube confirms it.

A vertical two-minute clip, an 18-minute cut on an unverified channel, an AVI: each is turned away on that first megabyte. No video bytes move on the sample row, or on a refusal that lands there, so neither carries megabytes or the upload fee.

💡 What people use it for

• Publishing the render at the end of an editing pipeline, instead of leaving it in a bucket.
• Scheduling a back catalogue: one run per episode, each with its own publishAt, all private

until their moment.

• Posting to a second channel you manage, named by channelId so it cannot land on the wrong one.
• Keeping metadata consistent: category, tags and playlist come from your data.

🚧 What it does not do

• It cannot answer Google's "verify it's you" screen. That run stops at SESSION_CHECKPOINT

and publishes nothing. Clear the challenge in your own browser, then re-export.

• No Data API lane. Studio in a browser is the only path, for the reason below.
• Matroska and WebM skip the Short and 15-minute checks, because the duration cannot be read

from them. Those two land on YouTube's judgement rather than ours. MP4 is the safe choice.

• Playlists are matched on the title, not on the PL... id, since the picker is a search box.
• The altered-content question is always answered No. If your video needs a yes, set it in

Studio yourself afterwards.

• It does not wait for HD processing. A video looks soft for a while after publishing and

sharpens on its own.

• One shape of file is judged only after the whole transfer: an MP4 with its moov atom at the

end, on a host that ignores a range request. The refusal arrives with the megabytes already billed. Serve a faststart MP4: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy -movflags +faststart out.mp4.

• Your saved session lives in a store called youtube-uploader-sessions **in your own Apify

account**, and no cookie value ever reaches a dataset row.

🧭 Which YouTube actor do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Can I use the official API instead? Not usefully. A video uploaded through videos.insert from an unverified API project created after 28 July 2020 is locked to private forever, with no appeal on YouTube's own help pages. That is why there is no API mode here.

Why was my vertical video refused? At three minutes or under YouTube would have filed it as a Short, server-side, with no way back except deleting it. Use the Shorts actor, or letterbox it.

Where do my cookies go? Into your own Apify account, in the store named above, and into the browser this actor drives.

Can I try it first? Tick demoMode, or run it with no cookies on an account with no saved session. You get one labelled sample row, no upload and no video bytes.

How do I switch channels? Paste the new account's export. Anything you paste wins, and the saved session is not read on that run.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab with the run id and the row's errorCode. A LAYOUT_CHANGED row means Studio moved something and we need to hear about it.