I’ve got a program that splits market research videos into 30 minute chunks and uploads them to YouTube, via the API. I know there are API limits, but they don’t seem to be published. Is there a set limit to how frequently you can upload videos via the API?
What I’m doing now is uploading a video, and if it takes less than 5 minutes, the program sleeps until 5 minutes have passed. I realize I could just continuously upload them, and catch the “too many recent calls” API exception, but then I have to make the program wait 10 minutes to reset the quota. If there is a limit, I’d just like to be able to adjust the program around that.
The canonical source of information is this blog post. We recently covered this topic as part of a YouTube Developers Live broadcast, and there’s a new embedded video at the bottom of that post in which I answer the question in a lot more detail.
To summarize a more specific answer from the video (which I recommend watching, anyway), waiting 10 minutes can often be overkill, but was a handy interval to give out as a best practice. You won’t be penalized if you keep uploading as fast you can and then wait for fewer than 10 minutes once you encounter a quota error. An exponential backoff in which you start with waiting a minute and then work your way up to 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. is reasonable, too.