Overview

The Media Sync plugin for YouTube provides a one-way sync from your YouTube channel into your Rock instance. When you upload a video into YouTube, it will be automatically created in Rock. The only way to play a YouTube video is with an embedded player to their site. Therefore, you will not get true video URL links that can be used to download the video. Don’t worry, this will still work with the Rock Media Player.

At present this plugin will not synchronize YouTube playlists to media folders. Instead, a single folder will be created called “Library”. Feel free to rename this if you want. All public videos in the channel will be synchronized into this one folder. Private and unlisted videos are not synchronized since they cannot be easily embedded.

Configuration

For the plugin to access your YouTube channel you need to configure a few things on YouTube. Specifically, you need to configure an authentication token for the plugin to use.

Configuring YouTube

To generate an authentication token, you need to go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/dashboard. Near the top in the blue header, you should see a drop down that says “Select a Project”, or it may already have a project name in it. Click on that to open the project selector dialog. Then in the upper right corner click the “New Project” link. You can enter anything you want for Project Name, but we recommend “Rock Production”. After you click the Create button you should see a small progress dialog come up telling you it’s creating the project. Once that is done click the “Select Project” link.

After the project is created, we need to enable it to use the YouTube API. Click on the “Enable APIs And Services” link. Search for “YouTube” and then select the “YouTube Data API v3” option. Next click on “Enable”. After that is done it will take you to the page for this API so we need to go back to our previous page. In the top left, click the hamburger menu and then go to APIs & Services > Credentials.

Up top on this page you should see a “Create Credentials” link. Click on that and then select API Key. Copy the API key it generates for use later in setting up Rock. Then click the “Restrict Key” button. On the restrictions page update the name of the key to something like “YouTube Access”. Towards the bottom of the page, you will see a section for “API restrictions”. Under that click the “Restrict key” radio button and then in the drop down select the “YouTube Data API v3” option. Click the Save button at the bottom and your API key will then be ready for use in Rock.

Configuring Rock

There is one last piece of data we need before we can setup the media account in Rock. You are going to need to know what your channel identifier is in YouTube. Don’t worry, it’s easy to find. Go to YouTube and make sure you are logged into your account. Under your Profile picture click “Your Channel” and it will take you to your channel page. Now the URL will look something like https://www.youtube.com/channel/your-channel-identifier. As you might guess, the part of the URL you need is where “your-channel-identifier” is.

In your Rock instance, you need to go to your Media Accounts page and add a new account that will be synced with YouTube. Set the Account Type to “YouTube Media Sync” and then enter the API key you previously in the Authorization Token field. You will also need to put that channel identifier in the Channel Id field and then you can save the account.

If you wish, you can click the Download button on the account details screen to initiate a sync to YouTube right away, or you can wait for the Rock job to run and perform the sync for you.