Permissions to access someone's private videos on YouTube

Question

We're working on an integration with youtube channels (using Youtube Data Api v3). We need to access the videos (private also) on our user's channels.

The flow is the following:

• User authorizes his/her youtube account on our site using OAuth.
• We show user the list of videos on user's youtube channel.
• User selects some of them (they can be private) and sends us for processing.
• We need to somehow access the actual video files which the user asks us to process.

The issue is that youtube does not give any streaming URLs or download links. Looks like, the API provides only iframe embedded code, which works ONLY for the browser, where the user is actually logged into youtube.

How can we access(can we?!) the private video, if we have the OAuth access-token of the video owner?

Answer 1

The YouTube Data API lets you incorporate functions normally executed on the YouTube website into your own website or application. The lists below identify the different types of resources that you can retrieve using the API. The API also supports methods to insert, update, or delete many of these resources. This in a sense means that you can see most of what you can see on the YouTube website including uploading new videos.

Downloading Youtube videos is against their Terms of Service, so the API does not support that.

Page linked above refers to Youtube ToS that states:

You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content.

YouTube partners may have access to this feature in their API (no idea i have never seen the api), if you have access to this i suggest you contact your manager directly they should be able to instruct you on how to access it assuming the feature exists.