YouTube Banned Reason

A script to find the banned reason for YouTube videos. This works by reading json/csv/xlsx files containing YouTube video data. It will grab the video ids from those files and query the YouTube iframe API to get the video's banned reason. We will update the Import files with this information and save them to the Export folder.

The script will add these columns to the video data: banned_status, banned_reason, banned_message (all say pretty much the same thing). If a video is available, these columns will be empty.

Run the script

1. Git clone the repository
2. Activate a virtual environment
3. Install the requirements pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Import the files you want to process into the 'Import' folder
   • Supported file formats are json, csv, and xlsx
5. Edit the video_id_column_name variable in the process.py file to the name of the column containing the video ids
6. Run the script python process.py
7. The output will be in the Export folder
   • Currently set to export as xlsx

Exported data

The script will add these columns to the video data: banned_status, banned_reason, banned_message. These are three different responses we get from YouTube's iFrame player API. The banned_message would be the message displayed on the YouTube site. The other values are likley used for YouTube's back end (we don't have documentation on their API).

If banned_status, banned_reason, banned_message are None, that means the YouTube video is not banned and is accessable.

Cookies & API Keys

For the API to work, you need a propritary API key and a cookie from the YouTube iFrame player. There is currenlty one in this project, but we do not know when it will expire. One way to generate your own is to open the player.html file and fetch the cookie and key from the player:

1. In Chrome, open player.html.
2. Open the developer side panel (Ctrl+Shift+I).
3. Click on the 'Network' Tab.
4. Filter network events by Name to order alphabetically.
5. Look for the event starting with player?key= and click on it.
6. Scroll down to reveal the Request Headers and make a note of the API key (within the path parameter) as well as the cookie.

If you are having issues contact Joseph or Thomas.