batch (Video Uploader)

This is a handy tool for making it easier to manage your YouTube channel (or channels). Note that unlike other products, this doesn't contain the tools you need to optimize traffic to your channel (like optimizing search terms and such). Instead, it is a "one stop shop" for core channel management related tasks, such as editing the meta information on your channel or existing videos, uploading new videos, reviewing and responding to comments, previewing your video content (including being able to "picture-in-picture" the video so you can watch while still working), and things of that nature. You can build up a queue of video uploads and then trigger them to upload in sequence or via simultaneous uploads (up to 10 at a time if your connection speed is up to the task). You can also tell it to turn your computer off once all of the uploads have completed, if you want to upload a run of videos and head off to bed. Another nice feature is the ability to create templates for video information, which allows you to set up the core information on a video (for example tags, title and body, visibility, and so on) as a named template in order to make things more consistent if you're doing a series of videos. This includes being able to create named "variables" that allow you to re-use text (say social media call outs or general credits) in multiple templates without having to copy and paste, which makes tweaking easier going forward. A curious omission (although this is version 1.0) is the ability to edit videos in bulk, such as tweaking the tags for a group of videos all in one shot instead of having to do each individually. However this could be explained by a focus more on getting content up than revisiting old content to optimize views, as previously mentioned. For me what really sells this is speed by which everything works; since it only needs to transmit the core data and not display and render a page, things as simple as editing the description of a video are much faster than doing the same thing "live" on the YouTube site. Even copying tags from one video to another is much faster than doing the same on YouTube directly. There are still some rough edges on things at this point, but this is the first release (at the time this was written) so I would imagine that these will be ironed out fairly quickly. For example, the controls for video position and volume are sliders that are only click-able and not drag-able, which makes seeking in a video or discretely adjusting volume a little fiddly. Similarly the functionality for replying to comments could be a bit more streamlined. The bottom line is that depending on the type of management you need to do on your channel, this may or may not fit in with your needs; everyone will have their own ideas for must-have features. There may also be other tools that do similar things (although as stand alone programs, I never ran into any that seemed comparable to this). With all that said, what YouTube Center does, I think it does pretty well. It definitely fits the bill for my current needs.