Is it possible to get the YouTube author name for

Question

So I'm working on switching to using the v3 version of the YouTube api (which is so much better it's like a completely different product), but I'm either missing something or it is ...

Being able to fetch an arbitrary list of videos, and their details, in one call is going to make life significantly better, but in the videos list method, the the video details "snippet" contains the "channelId", not the "author".

I've spent quite a bit of time looking through the documentation, but can't find any way of getting from a channelId to the human readable author name.

How am I expected to map a video to an author?

Answer 1

The accepted answer may have been correct at the time of writing, but as of 2/2018 the snippet part now includes a channelTitle property.

Answer 2

It's not possible to get back a display name (either legacy YouTube name or Google+ name) for a channel as part of the video.snippet response. You need to take the channelId and perform a channels.list(id=channelId1,channelId2,...,part=snippet) operation to get that information. The good part is that you can pass in up to 50 channel ids in a single call.

This sort of separation of information into different resources with ids effectively serving as keys linking the resources was a deliberate decision. The engineering team is aware that it will require developers to make an additional API call, but they're in favor of that design.

At the same time, the API is still in an experimental release, and if you have any feedback about using the API while doing real-world development, feel free to open a feature request in the issue tracker. If enough people give feedback about a certain aspect of the API, that could factor in to the final revision's design.