damonscaife/reddit-to-youtube-pipeline

Reddit to YouTube Pipeline is a Python project that turns popular Reddit story posts into narrated, fully edited YouTube videos without any manual editing. It was built and is actually used to run a real YouTube channel, so it is a working production system rather than a demo. The pipeline runs in a series of steps. First it fetches top storytelling posts from chosen subreddits, such as ones focused on relationship drama or petty revenge stories, using Reddit's public JSON and RSS feeds, so no API key is needed for this part. It then turns the cleaned up story text into a spoken voiceover using a free text to speech tool called edge-tts. Next, it scans the narration for certain keywords and automatically adds matching sound effects at the right moments. After that, it assembles either a vertical YouTube Short, with a gameplay video in the background, the voiceover, and a styled card showing the original Reddit post, or a horizontal long form video combining three to five stories with title cards between them. The pipeline also writes a title, description, and hashtags for each video, and finally uploads the finished video to YouTube using the official YouTube Data API, keeping track of what has already been posted so nothing gets uploaded twice. The only manual decision left in the process is choosing which stories to feature and how to word the title and description, since that is what the creator sees as separating an engaging channel from generic content. The pipeline uses Python 3 throughout, edge-tts for narration, Pillow for the post card graphics, and FFmpeg for combining audio and video, called from the code but installed separately. Publishing uses the YouTube Data API with a one time browser login the first time you upload. Setup requires installing Python dependencies, installing FFmpeg separately, and creating your own YouTube API credentials through Google Cloud Console. Each step of the pipeline can also be run on its own, with data passed along as files you can inspect between steps.