YouTube video submissions: AVR videos rejected as duplicate - tips to resolve

Some of our customers may have noted that when they do a video submission to YouTube, it may have got flagged as "duplicate" by YouTube. This would happen even if its a brand new project created out of their ArticleVideoRobot account. As advised by Google in the following help article, YouTube runs a checksum on the video to identify duplicate content that results in some of the videos being flagged as duplicate.

YouTube Help: Rejected (duplicate upload) message

However, it sometimes catches original video postings as some of you may have experienced. The help article advises to change the video length. The easiest way to resolve it using the ArticleVideoRobot wizard is to add a sentence to any of your existing slides. If you use the Heading Only paragraph style, then the other way out is to summarize the sentence so that its shorter (or you may want to make it longer as well). Remember to re-generate your voice-over for the slide that you changed as ArticleVideoRobot does not automatically re-generate voices when there is a change.

One other though that comes up (though not tested much) is that you can alter the video length without having to change the text. Simply re-generate the voice-over using a different voice and this should result in a new mp3 file that has a slightly different play time. This results in a slight change (increase or decrease) to the timing of the video depending on the pitch and speed of the voice. It means the final video length results in a different checksum when YouTube runs its checks.

Customers using Dynasubmit

The other common scenario during which the YouTube checksum results sometimes cause duplicate flags is when you use Dynasubmit. While the different titles/description identifies a video as an unique post, the checksum may identify the video as a duplicate. We had this scenario with one of our users hence the reason I post it given that it means the checksum feature could work negatively for the Dyansubmit option. That said, t should be fair enough that our customers are aware of the possible "duplicate" flag when working with Dynasubmit. If you ask me from my experience working with customers who use Dynasubmit, except for one of our customers, I have not had reports from other customers on their videos being flagged as duplicate on using Dynasubmit. Nevertheless, its still something to look out for when using Dynasubmit.

I hope the information in the post helps. Please feel free to open a Support Ticket if you seem experience this problem and need additional assistance to resolve.