Overview

Crank takes a topic and generates a complete YouTube Short (video and metadata) ready for upload. It's written in Olive, a fast compiled language that keeps the pipeline lean and the output predictable.

Prerequisites

• Olive >= 0.4.3 (see installation below)
• Python 3.x with dependencies from requirements.txt
• ffmpeg and ffprobe in your system PATH

Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the project root:

GEMINI_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Credential Files

secrets.json: OAuth 2.0 client credentials for YouTube API upload

Customization

config/preset.yml

Key	Description
NAME	Channel name
PROMPT	Topic or idea to base the generated video on
UPLOAD	true or false to enable/disable uploads
DELAY	Hours between uploads (0 for instant, positive number to schedule)
GEMINI_API_KEY	Channel-specific API key (overrides .env if set)
WHISPER_MODEL	Whisper model size (tiny, base, small, medium, large-v1/v2/v3)
OAUTH_PATH	Path to OAuth credentials (defaults to secrets.json)
FONT	Caption font (defaults to Comic Sans MS)

config/prompt.yml

Key	Description
GET_CONTENT	Guidelines for generating the transcript
GET_TITLE	Guidelines for generating the title
GET_SEARCH_TERM	YouTube search term for background video scraping
GET_DESCRIPTION	Guidelines for generating the description
GET_CATEGORY_ID	Guidelines for generating the category ID

Installation

Olive

Linux / macOS:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ecnivslabs/olive/master/install.sh | sh

Crank

Clone and build from source:

git clone https://github.com/vinceswu/crank.git
cd crank
pip install -r requirements.txt

Install ffmpeg:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install ffmpeg

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S ffmpeg

# macOS
brew install ffmpeg

# Windows (Chocolatey)
choco install ffmpeg

Download spaCy model:

python -m spacy download en_core_web_md

Running Crank

# Default config
pit run

# Custom config path
pit run --path path/to/your_config.yml

Example Output

example.mp4

Support the project

Plugin Development

For information about creating custom background video plugins, see PLUGIN_GUIDE.md.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/my-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'add my feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/my-feature)
5. Submit a pull request

I'd appreciate any feedback or code reviews you might have!