Quotelet

A YouTube Shorts channel that runs itself. Tell it how many videos you want, and it writes them, builds them, and uploads them — no hands.

Honest origin story: I was being lazy. I liked the idea of running a YouTube channel a lot more than the idea of actually making videos for one, so I spent far more effort building a program to do it than the videos would ever have cost me.

Channel: @Quotelet1

The pipeline

1. Pick a quote from a curated CSV ("Quote text", "Author", "n" — the flag marks used/unused)
2. Pick a background clip at random from a folder of hand-picked 9:16 stock footage
3. Pick a track at random
4. Composite — loop/trim the video to the audio length, draw the quote and author onto a semi-transparent panel, render at 60fps across 16 CPU threads
5. Upload to YouTube as a public Short via the YouTube Data API
6. Mark the quote used so it never repeats

The tradeoff this project is really about

You're always trading between automation, AI and quality, and you rarely get all three.

• I tried generating quotes live from an LLM API, but the replies came back chatty and inconsistently formatted — useless to a script. So I generated a clean CSV of 100 quotes up front instead. Quality over automation.
• I tried pulling background clips from the Pexels API, but auto-picked footage was off-theme or too long. So I hand-picked 29 clips that actually fit. Quality again.
• Audio: hand-picked. Same reason.

Everything that could be automated without hurting the output is automated. Everything that couldn't, isn't. That's the whole design.

Setup

pip install moviepy pillow numpy google-api-python-client google-auth

Expected folder layout:

automatedvidgen/
├── audios/          background tracks
├── videos/          9:16 stock clips
├── finishedvideos/  output
└── quotes.txt       "Quote text", "Author", "n"

Update the paths at the top of quotelet.py, and point credentials_path at your own YouTube OAuth credentials JSON (not included, obviously). Then:

python quotelet.py
> How many videos would you like to generate and upload? 5

Run it from a real terminal, not the PyCharm/IDLE console — rendering starts but never finishes there.

Write-up

Full story: Quotelet