01Getting started
Three steps the first time, then nothing. Make an account at vydro.app/signup with an email or your Google login — same path you'd take for any other web app. The Free tier doesn't ask for a card.
Once you're in the dashboard, hit Connect YouTube. You'll see Google's standard OAuth screen. Vydro asks for the youtube.upload scope — nothing else, no reading your inbox, no contact list. Two clicks and you're back.
Paste a TikTok or Reels link into the Add tab. Hit add. The job lands in your queue with an estimated post time. Walk away. The next time you open YouTube Studio the Short is live, watermark stripped, titled, scheduled — exactly the thing you'd have spent fifteen minutes building manually.
02What Vydro does to your video
When you submit a link, the queue runs a six-stage pipeline before the upload lands on YouTube. Each stage logs to your job timeline so you can see exactly what happened if a video looks wrong.
Fetch. We download the source video from the platform — TikTok via their public CDN, Reels through Instagram's public graph. No login, no scraping that depends on a session cookie. About 2 seconds for a 30-second short.
Watermark strip. Our FFmpeg pipeline detects the platform watermark by position and animation profile (TikTok's bottom-left/right oscillation, Reels' static top-left logo), then masks it with the surrounding frame content. Average runtime: 4 seconds on a 30-second clip. The frame doesn't crop — faces stay where they were.
Reformat. YouTube Shorts expects 1080×1920 at 9:16. If the source already matches we pass it through; if not, we letterbox cleanly without stretching faces. Re-encoded with libx264 at CRF 23 — visually lossless, file size sensible.
Transcribe. The audio goes through Whisper (small.en model) for a transcript. We need this for the title step. Takes 3 to 8 seconds depending on length.
Title + description. An LLM reads the transcript and writes a YouTube-SEO title under 60 characters plus a short description, both tuned to the kind of content you've uploaded before. You can edit either before publish or set the queue to fully autonomous.
Schedule. The job lands in the queue at your chosen upload time. Daily defaults to once a day at your selected hour; Pro can schedule multiple per day or auto-time to your audience's peak watch hours pulled from the YouTube Data API.
03Title modes
Three ways to set a title, picked per video or as a default for the queue. Most creators settle on AI mode after the first week — it's the option that scales when you're queueing twenty Shorts at once.
Manual. You type the title yourself before the video posts. Useful when a clip needs a specific narrative hook (an inside joke, a callback to a previous Short, a literal title from the original creator's caption). Slow at volume but precise.
AI. An LLM writes the title from the audio transcript. The prompt is tuned for YouTube Shorts: under 60 characters, one strong hook, no emoji, no all-caps. You can override the generated title in the dashboard before the upload runs. Default for new accounts.
Qutybopa trending. We pull the trending hashtag from the qutybopa YouTube channel and graft it onto the AI title — a niche-specific lift for creators whose channel sits in qutybopa's gravitational pull (lifestyle, GRWM, day-in-the-life). Don't use it if your channel is unrelated to that niche; the mismatched tags hurt more than they help.
04Hashtag rotation
Every account has a default_hashtags pool — between 5 and 30 tags that describe your channel. On each upload Vydro picks 3 at random from the pool and stitches them into the description.
Why rotation matters: YouTube's algorithm distrusts identical metadata across uploads. If every Short you ship has the exact same five hashtags in the exact same order, the upload pattern looks automated — which it is — and your reach throttles. Rotating from a larger pool keeps each upload's metadata fingerprint distinct enough that the system reads as varied.
You set the pool in Settings → Hashtag pool. Keep tags relevant — random or off-niche tags trigger their own filters. A good pool covers the channel's niche (e.g. for a fitness creator: #fitnesstips, #homeworkout, #shortsworkout) plus a few broader category tags (#fitness, #wellness). Three to four niche, two to three broad.
05Watermark
Paid plans drop the Vydro watermark by default. You can replace it with your own — an image (PNG with transparency) or a text watermark (a short channel handle or URL). Set both in Settings → Watermark.
Image watermark. PNG, ideally under 200KB. Vydro composites it onto each frame at the position you pick: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. Use transparency around your logo — solid backgrounds look amateur on someone else's footage.
Text watermark. Whatever you type appears in a clean sans-serif at the position you set. Good for channel handles that double as @-mentions when viewers screenshot the Short. Slightly less work to set up than an image; reads as more honest.
Position trade-offs: bottom-left avoids YouTube's UI badges, top-right avoids subtitle burn-ins. We default to bottom-left because most YouTube interface elements (like and comment count, channel ribbon) live on the right side of the Shorts player.
06Scheduling
Scheduling is the single biggest lever on a Shorts channel. Same content, posted at the right hour, can hit two or three times the reach of a midnight drop. Vydro gives three options at different levels of sophistication.
Daily. Free and Starter default to once per day at the hour you pick — 6pm local is fine for most niches. The job lands at the same hour every day until the queue runs out.
Custom hours. On Pro, you can set up to five upload windows per day. Useful if you've noticed a second engagement spike (lunch + evening, or morning + late night for international audiences). Don't go over five — YouTube starts flagging volume above six Shorts per day per channel.
Peak-hour optimization. Also Pro. We pull your channel's three highest-engagement hours from the YouTube Analytics API and auto-time uploads to land 15 minutes before each peak. The data refreshes nightly. Worth turning on once your channel has at least 30 days of analytics history — before that the model has too few data points and the recommended hours drift.
07Auto-comment
Vydro can post a comment under each Short the moment it goes live. Pro accounts can also auto-pin the comment to the top, which is the bit that actually drives clicks.
Set a template comment in Settings → Auto-comment. The template can include a {{title}} token that gets replaced with the video's title, and a {{handle}} token that gets replaced with your channel handle. Most people use it for a clean call-to-action: "more like this? subscribe for daily {{handle}}."
Free and Starter post the comment but don't pin. Pro pins automatically. Pinned comments sit above all viewer comments and consistently outperform un-pinned channel comments by 4x to 10x in click-through to subscribe, which is the metric you actually care about pre-AdSense.
08Referrals
Every account has a referral link in Dashboard → Refer. When a friend signs up with your link and completes three real uploads, you both get rewards.
The referrer gets a $10 Stripe credit applied to their next invoice plus 10 bonus uploads. The referee (your friend) gets 5 bonus uploads on top of whatever their plan includes. The credit shows up automatically the next time we bill you — no coupon code to remember.
Why three uploads instead of one: a one-upload threshold attracts fraud rings that signup-and-bounce. Three uploads means real OAuth, real watermark passes, real YouTube API calls. Costly enough to fake that we've never seen it abused.
Max payout: $500 per referrer (50 successful refs). Past that the credit stops accruing but you can keep sharing the link.
09Plans and limits
Three plans, all monthly, with the same 30-day trial across the two paid tiers. We don't have annual billing yet — most creators on Vydro are A/B-testing whether short-form repurposing pays off for their channel, and a year-long commitment defeats the experiment.
Free: 10 reposts a month. Vydro watermark on each upload. One channel. AI titles, basic schedule (one upload per day, no peak-hour optimization). No card required.
Starter ($9/month, $19 starting fall 2026): 30 reposts a month. No Vydro watermark, custom title style, an AI-generated thumbnail. One channel. 30-day free trial.
Pro ($29/month, $39 starting fall 2026): unlimited reposts, priority queue, multi-channel support, peak-hour optimization, auto-comment pinning, bulk import. 30-day free trial.
Cancel any time. The queue freezes at cancellation but anything already scheduled still ships.
10Account safety
We've been honest about this on the FAQ too, and it's worth repeating here. Channels reposting their own content, or transformatively reusing public material with attribution, do not get banned. Channels reposting blatantly stolen content — entire videos from other creators with no permission, no commentary, no credit — get demonetized or banned, and Vydro can't protect against that.
What Vydro does to keep the queue clean: hashtags rotate, AI-generated titles vary in phrasing, the upload schedule isn't a perfect cron tick (we add a 90-second jitter). The pipeline doesn't add any signal that distinguishes its uploads from a human-driven Studio upload — we use the standard YouTube Data API v3 endpoint with the standard scope.
What you should do: don't repost music that's clearly someone else's intellectual property unless you've licensed it. Don't repost entire long-form videos from another creator without permission. If you're moving your own TikToks to your own YouTube, you're fine — this is the bulk of what Vydro is used for. If you're reposting other people's content, transformative use only — credit, commentary, or both.
11Getting help
Three places, in order of speed. Discord first — the team and a handful of long-time users hang out there and most questions get answered within an hour during US daytime. discord.gg/ZVzVmue5yp.
Email support@vydro.app for anything account-specific (billing, refunds, login issues, account deletion). Written replies usually come within 12 hours, often same-day.
This page covers the common operational questions. If something is missing, tell us — we add sections based on what people actually ask on Discord, and the doc gets longer every couple of weeks.