Check a Short has sound and picture before adding it to a YouTube show

How do you check a Short before it joins a show?

Run it through a probe and a handful of stills. YouTube's shows page lists high-quality video and sound as a quality standard and says videos with no visuals likely will not be considered a show, so each episode needs both a picture and a sound track.

Sume's video inspect reads one media.sume.com clip, never re-encodes it, and returns probe facts and stills. The default is a synchronous call that waits up to 30 seconds and returns 200, or returns 202 and you poll.

The three checks

First, sound. A probe with frames set to false is enough to read has_audio. If you ask for a transcript on a clip with no audio track, the API refuses with inspect_source_has_no_audio, so probe before you transcribe.

Second, picture. Leave frames unset for 8 mid-bin stills and look at them: if they are the same image, the episode is a static hold. Third, shape. Each still carries its width and height, so portrait or square is visible at a glance.

• has_audio false: fix the mix.
• Eight near-identical stills: add picture slots.
• Width greater than height: re-render before conversion.
• Duration over 180 seconds: split or trim.

Using it across a season

Import each file first, since the API does not fetch the open internet, and send an Idempotency-Key on every inspect so a retry is safe. The stills are durable media.sume.com images, so you can reuse the best one as a thumbnail base.

Transcripts help in one more way: reading the transcript catches a wrong word before it goes live, at one cent per audio minute. Inspect itself is billed by its compute, so read the rate in the catalog rather than assuming it.

What it does not do

Inspect returns facts, not a verdict. It cannot tell you whether YouTube will treat a show as a show, because the help page gives no pass mark. It only confirms that each file has the basics.

Keep the answers in your ledger next to each episode, with the job id of the inspect call. When a render is replaced, run the same three checks again, so the show never holds an episode that skipped them.