YouTube videos.insert: 256 GB limit and containsSyntheticMedia

The YouTube Data API accepts uploads up to 256 GB through videos.insert, with MIME types video/* and application/octet-stream, and lets you declare AI-made content with status.containsSyntheticMedia in the same request body. For short clips the size limit is irrelevant; the flag is the part that needs a decision on every upload. This is a body example plus a guard that stops you uploading a Sume-generated file without a declaration.

Facts from the method page

Request body with the flag

The body below sets the declaration from your own record of how the file was made. Keep that record in your pipeline: whether the video came from a Sume model, a trim of one, or neither. Cutting or captioning a real recording does not make it synthetic on its own, but that is your call and YouTube's policy, not Sume's.

def insert_body(title, made_with_ai, privacy="private"):
    if made_with_ai is None:
        raise ValueError("decide containsSyntheticMedia explicitly")
    return {
        "snippet": {"title": title[:100]},
        "status": {
            "privacyStatus": privacy,
            "containsSyntheticMedia": bool(made_with_ai),
        },
    }

print(insert_body("Product demo", made_with_ai=True))

Producing the file

If the upload came out of Sume, store the job id next to the file. Video trim ($0.02 per job) and video captions ($0.20 per clip up to 60 seconds) each return a new MP4 URL, so the provenance of every upload is one job id away.

A pre-upload guard

Make the declaration a required argument, as the function above does, so no code path can upload without someone having decided. The decision itself is simple to record at creation time: when a job id from a generation endpoint produced the file, mark it true; when a person filmed it, mark it false; when you cannot tell, stop. Because the guard raises on None, a forgotten flag fails in your tests instead of on a published video.

Limits

The quota wording on the page reads oddly (a per-day call count next to a unit cost), so confirm your own quota in the Google Cloud console rather than planning from this table. We did not verify here which uploads YouTube requires you to label, or what happens when the field is omitted; read the YouTube policy page for that. For the field in more depth, see containsSyntheticMedia when uploading an AI video.