How do I get info about a Youtube video's chapters from the API? - api

Question

Recently, Youtube added the ability to break up their videos in the progress bar into sections called "chapters".
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9884579?hl=en
Currently I am able to get info about a video from the Youtube API. However, it doesn't seem like there's any info about a video's chapters, and I haven't found anything in the API documentation about chapters. Am I missing something, or is there simply no way to get chapter data yet?

Answer 1

As far as I know, such data is in plain text in the description of the video.
So, you can use the following example:
Video used in this demonstration: Top 10 Monsters with 2500 Attack in YuGiOh
URL Request:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet&id=NNgYId7b4j0&key=[YOUR_API_KEY]
Response:
{
"kind": "youtube#videoListResponse",
"etag": "YpVLmrSx1iP8hAJOnumaTBoKqqQ",
"items": [
{
"kind": "youtube#video",
"etag": "oIoJq5F3RHvBbtVohafaJ_1SThU",
"id": "NNgYId7b4j0",
"snippet": {
"publishedAt": "2020-09-14T18:37:46Z",
"channelId": "UC0roOaAn95Rtgoe078RkVXQ",
"title": "Top 10 Monsters with 2500 Attack in YuGiOh",
"description": "In this video we'll go over the best monsters that have 2500 attack, and attack threshold for a lot of boss monsters actually.\n\nCheck out my DnD channel #TheD&DLogs \n\n--The List--\nIntro: (0:00)\n10- Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon: (0:00)\n9- Invoked Mechaba: (2:14)\n8- Number S39: Utopia the Lightning: (3:23)\n7- Earthbound Immortal Aslla Piscu: (4:35)\n6- Eldlich the golden Lord: (6:04)\n5- True King Lithosagym the Disaster: (7:34)\n4- Block Dragon: (8:54)\n3- Astrograph sorcerer: (10:25)\n2- Beatrice lady of the eternal: (12:36)\n1- Firewall Dragon: (14:37)\n- \n-----------------------------------------\n#yugioh #top10 \n\nDuels are all done on EDOpro, its completely free and updated all the time. If you want it, just look for the EDOpro discord and you'll find all you need to download it from there\n\nSome of the Video backgrounds in this video were made by \"Amitai Angor AA VFX\" https://www.youtube.com/dvdangor2011\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hirumared\nhttps://twitter.com/TheDuelLogs",
"thumbnails": {
"default": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NNgYId7b4j0/default.jpg",
"width": 120,
"height": 90
},
"medium": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NNgYId7b4j0/mqdefault.jpg",
"width": 320,
"height": 180
},
"high": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NNgYId7b4j0/hqdefault.jpg",
"width": 480,
"height": 360
},
"standard": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NNgYId7b4j0/sddefault.jpg",
"width": 640,
"height": 480
},
"maxres": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NNgYId7b4j0/maxresdefault.jpg",
"width": 1280,
"height": 720
}
},
"channelTitle": "TheDuelLogs",
"tags": [
"yugioh",
"ygo",
"dev",
"pro",
"link",
"duels",
"auto-matic duels",
"online",
"current",
"ban",
"list",
"dueling",
"network",
"theduellogs",
"the",
"duel",
"logs",
"loggs",
"Yu",
"Gi",
"Oh!",
"YGOpro",
"gimmick",
"links",
"top ten",
"2020",
"edopro"
],
"categoryId": "20",
"liveBroadcastContent": "none",
"localized": {
"title": "Top 10 Monsters with 2500 Attack in YuGiOh",
"description": "In this video we'll go over the best monsters that have 2500 attack, and attack threshold for a lot of boss monsters actually.\n\nCheck out my DnD channel #TheD&DLogs \n\n--The List--\nIntro: (0:00)\n10- Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon: (0:00)\n9- Invoked Mechaba: (2:14)\n8- Number S39: Utopia the Lightning: (3:23)\n7- Earthbound Immortal Aslla Piscu: (4:35)\n6- Eldlich the golden Lord: (6:04)\n5- True King Lithosagym the Disaster: (7:34)\n4- Block Dragon: (8:54)\n3- Astrograph sorcerer: (10:25)\n2- Beatrice lady of the eternal: (12:36)\n1- Firewall Dragon: (14:37)\n- \n-----------------------------------------\n#yugioh #top10 \n\nDuels are all done on EDOpro, its completely free and updated all the time. If you want it, just look for the EDOpro discord and you'll find all you need to download it from there\n\nSome of the Video backgrounds in this video were made by \"Amitai Angor AA VFX\" https://www.youtube.com/dvdangor2011\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hirumared\nhttps://twitter.com/TheDuelLogs"
},
"defaultAudioLanguage": "en"
}
}
],
"pageInfo": {
"totalResults": 1,
"resultsPerPage": 1
}
}
Get the response:
response.items[0].snippet.description
Results:
"In this video we'll go over the best monsters that have 2500 attack, and attack threshold for a lot of boss monsters actually.
Check out my DnD channel #TheD&DLogs
--The List--
Intro: (0:00)
10- Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon: (0:00)
9- Invoked Mechaba: (2:14)
8- Number S39: Utopia the Lightning: (3:23)
7- Earthbound Immortal Aslla Piscu: (4:35)
6- Eldlich the golden Lord: (6:04)
5- True King Lithosagym the Disaster: (7:34)
4- Block Dragon: (8:54)
3- Astrograph sorcerer: (10:25)
2- Beatrice lady of the eternal: (12:36)
1- Firewall Dragon: (14:37)
-
-----------------------------------------
#yugioh #top10
Duels are all done on EDOpro, its completely free and updated all the time. If you want it, just look for the EDOpro discord and you'll find all you need to download it from there
Some of the Video backgrounds in this video were made by "Amitai Angor AA VFX" https://www.youtube.com/dvdangor2011
https://twitter.com/hirumared
https://twitter.com/TheDuelLogs"

Answer 2

One more time YouTube Data API v3 doesn't provide a basic feature.
I would suggest you to use my open-source YouTube operational API, indeed by requesting https://yt.lemnoslife.com/videos?part=chapters&id=VIDEO_ID you would get a JSON with the video chapters (titles and timestamps) you are looking for in item['chapters']['chapters'].
Example of result with YouTube video id NNgYId7b4j0:
{
"kind": "youtube#videoListResponse",
"etag": "NotImplemented",
"items": [
{
"kind": "youtube#video",
"etag": "NotImplemented",
"id": "NNgYId7b4j0",
"chapters": {
"areAutoGenerated": false,
"chapters": [
{
"title": "10- Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon",
"time": 0,
"thumbnails": [
{
"url": "https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/NNgYId7b4j0\/hqdefault_4000.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEiCKgBEF5IWvKriqkDFQgBFQAAAAAYASUAAMhCPQCAokN4AQ==&rs=AOn4CLCoTrvu0Yu-iNxb7o4II-pxi5WVbQ",
"width": 168,
"height": 94
},
{
"url": "https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/NNgYId7b4j0\/hqdefault_4000.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEjCNACELwBSFryq4qpAxUIARUAAAAAGAElAADIQj0AgKJDeAE=&rs=AOn4CLCuupNwIgFIf9hXbjMsvpSGThFyhg",
"width": 336,
"height": 188
}
]
},
{
"title": "9- Invoked Mechaba",
"time": 134,
"thumbnails": [
{
"url": "https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/NNgYId7b4j0\/hqdefault_135933.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEiCKgBEF5IWvKriqkDFQgBFQAAAAAYASUAAMhCPQCAokN4AQ==&rs=AOn4CLBe94BKNpQXvM2dUl75LtcgX0N03w",
"width": 168,
"height": 94
},
{
"url": "https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/NNgYId7b4j0\/hqdefault_135933.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEjCNACELwBSFryq4qpAxUIARUAAAAAGAElAADIQj0AgKJDeAE=&rs=AOn4CLBULUhlI1OOjJiW6mpFDUhPzh4Adw",
"width": 336,
"height": 188
}
]
},
...
]
}
}
]
}

Answer 3

I am replying with this answer to help people such as myself who ended up on this video wanting to find a youtube chapter parser / extractor for text rather than where to find the chapter data. Just to add some further information, currently, there is no way to get the chapters from the official YouTube API, so the only way to get the chapters from a text-description response (like the YouTube API provides) is to parse it in some way:
My answer is in Javascript but it can easily be converted: The idea is to extract the MIN:SEC and HR:MIN:SEC timestamps then to generate the title we remove the word that includes them (So this would typically remove however people aesthetically wrap them too [00:00] or (00:00)
It's far from perfect, but in my experience it's better than the other solutions I've seen on github/npm at the time of writing this. You might want to also trim away starting and ending spaces and punctuational separators such as (-, :, ~, |) too
const parseChapters = (description) => {
// Extract timestamps (either 00:00:00, 0:00:00, 00:00 or 0:00)
const lines = description.split("\n")
const regex = /(\d{0,2}:?\d{1,2}:\d{2})/g
const chapters = []
for (const line of lines) {
// Match the regex and check if the line contains a matched regex
const matches = line.match(regex)
if (matches) {
const ts = matches[0]
const title = line
.split(" ")
.filter((l) => !l.includes(ts))
.join(" ")
chapters.push({
timestamp: ts,
title: title,
})
}
}
return chapters
}

Answer 4

Very late answer but it solved my problem.
You could use the code below. It's written in C# but it can easily be transcribed into another language. Since you can already get youtube video data, I assume you also have the description of the video.
private static IEnumerable<string> GetChaptersFromDescription(string text)
{
var lines = text.Split("\n");
var regex = new Regex(#"[0-9]:[0-9][0-9]");
foreach (var line in lines)
{
if (regex.IsMatch(line))
{
yield return line;
}
}
}