❓ Best way to handle YouTube subtitles delay after automatic upload from Google Drive

How To
1

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a 2-step automation process using Make, and I’m facing a limitation related to the subtitle generation delay on YouTube. Here’s what I’m trying to do :backhand_index_pointing_down:

:repeat_button: My current setup

Step 1 – Upload video from Google Drive to YouTube

  • I automatically detect new Google Meet recordings in my Drive.
  • I upload them to YouTube as unlisted videos so that automatic subtitles can be generated by YouTube.
  • Once the upload starts, I immediately trigger Scenario 2.

Step 2 – Wait and fetch subtitles

  • I use multiple Sleep modules (max 300 seconds each) to wait up to 40 minutes.
  • Then I send a request to fetch the subtitles via RapidAPI’s YouTube Transcript API.

The problem is: for long videos, subtitles are not ready within 40 minutes, so I have to manually restart the scenario later.

:cross_mark: Current limitation

Since Make doesn’t allow Sleep longer than 40 minutes and no native retry mechanism is available beyond that point, I’m stuck.

:white_check_mark: What I’d like to do

  • Each day: check for new videos in Google Drive.
  • Upload them to YouTube.
  • Then, several hours later (or the next day), automatically attempt to retrieve subtitles.
  • Send the subtitles to another scenario which will generate content ideas from the transcript.

But I want to avoid using Sleep or manual relaunches.

:brain: Questions

How would you structure this process to decouple the subtitle retrieval from the upload delay?
Any best practices to monitor when subtitles are actually ready (besides trying every X hours)?

Thanks in advance for your ideas and experience :folded_hands:

Here are screenshots of my current scenarios if that helps:

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—
Romain

2

You might be able to use a Custom Webhook with a webhook callback when your video is ready.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there are any further questions or issues.

— @samliew

3

Thanks a lot @samliew for your answer :folded_hands:

I had the same hope regarding a webhook or callback mechanism, but as far as I know, YouTube doesn’t offer any native webhook to notify when subtitles are ready.

I’m currently using RapidAPI’s YouTube Transcript API, which only allows polling (i.e. I have to keep trying every X minutes/hours until subtitles are available). So I’m not sure how I could turn that into a true callback logic.

4

Sometimes polling is the only option, and if you don’t want to do that with Make directly, you can “offload” it to another self-hosted server (or Google Apps Script), that only sends a request to the Custom Webhook when the polling finds an update.