Ingest a YouTube Live broadcast

Available in: UI · API

Use this how-to to ingest a publicly-available YouTube Live broadcast as the source of a Live stream. The encoder runs a dedicated auxiliary ingest that pulls the broadcast and republishes it onto the encoder's internal bus; from there the transcoding and publishing chain treats it like any other input.

When to use this

When the source of the Live stream is a public YouTube Live broadcast (a re-distribution scenario, a remote contribution that is being mirrored to YouTube first, a 24/7 reference channel, etc.). For originating a broadcast on YouTube from your own encoder, this is not the right flow — use a standard Channel (SDI, SRT, Stream) plus an RTMP Destination pointing at YouTube ingest instead.

Prerequisites

• The C21LiveYouTube license on the C21 Live Control instance. Without it the API rejects the create with APIf807 and the UI hides the type from the picker.
• The target broadcast is currently live and public — not unlisted, not private, not member-only. The 11-character Video ID is the value after ?v= in youtube.com/watch?v=<id> or after / in youtu.be/<id>.
• The deployment can reach YouTube from its outbound IP. If the deployment lives on a datacenter / cloud / VPS network and the broadcast fails the anti-bot challenge, a cookies file exported from a logged-in YouTube account must be in place on the encoder host (deployment-side detail — see the encoder operator runbook with your Cires21 representative).
• A user with Operator or System Administrator role.

Constraints

• The Video ID is the public consumer-side identifier — not a YouTube Studio RTMP stream key. The two values are unrelated.
• Only name, description, alias and settings.youtube_video_id are accepted on this Channel type. Multi-audio, subtitles and audio-track configuration are not configurable — they are dropped by the API on save.
• The Video ID regex is ^[A-Za-z0-9_-]{11}$. Format violations are rejected with APIf001.

Via UI

Navigation: Sources → Add source.

Via API

curl -X POST "https://<your-host>/c21apiv2/channels" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "YT Lofi 24/7",
    "alias": "yt-lofi",
    "description": "Reference music feed",
    "type": "Youtube Live",
    "settings": {
      "youtube_video_id": "jfKfPfyJRdk"
    }
  }'

The server discards every other settings key. The persisted blob is exactly {youtube_video_id: <id>}. Once saved, bind the Channel to a Live stream via PUT /c21apiv2/livestreams/{id} and start it with POST /c21apiv2/livestreams/{id}/start (operationId startLivestream). See Start and stop a Live stream.

Verify

• The Channel appears in Sources with its Video ID and the derived Watch URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<id>) on the detail panel.
• After binding to a Live stream and starting, the Live stream's row on On air reports a healthy Channel entrypoint and starts producing output to the bound Destinations.
• The broadcast's events log shows a line confirming the YouTube Live input was added (the encoder logs Adding Youtube Live input with Video ID '<id>' on the input bring-up).

Troubleshooting

• APIf807 on save — the C21LiveYouTube license is missing or expired. The Channel type is still in the API contract but mutations are rejected. Verify the license under Licenses.
• APIf001 on save — the Video ID does not match ^[A-Za-z0-9_-]{11}$. Check the length and the charset; trim leading or trailing whitespace.
• Channel comes up but the broadcast never produces frames — the broadcast is no longer live, was switched to unlisted or private, or YouTube returned the anti-bot challenge on the deployment's IP. If the broadcast is confirmed live and reachable from a regular browser, the ingest is most likely blocked at the network layer — coordinate with your Cires21 representative to deploy a cookies file on the encoder.
• Live stream restarts after ~30 s of running without producing output — the encoder version pre-dates the watchdog fix for the YouTube Live container. Upgrade the encoder to the current release.

Cross-links

• Sources → Youtube Live — channel-type reference.
• Licenses — the C21LiveYouTube license model.
• Start and stop a Live stream — the start / stop lifecycle once the Channel is bound.

FAQ