When downloading captions from youtube I get 403 - youtube

I'm attempting to read captions from a youtube video but I keep getting 403 login required. When I provide an oauth token I get forbidden.
Why do I need authentication if all I'm doing is reading captions, something I can do if I visit youtube?
I can hack together something to pull them without going through the api, but I'd rather stay in Google's good books and abide by their tos.
There is a service called downsub.com which provides captions for all youtube videos, so I'm wondering if they are using youtube apis or something homebrew.
An example from the API explorer is this: https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#p/youtube/v3/youtube.captions.download?id=jMEVWVvrx_rd-FTZ2H4--MRAwNik5PAo6m3UYxQwdn4%253D&tfmt=srt&_h=1&

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Permissions to access someone's private videos on YouTube

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?
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.

Is there a Youtube API endpoint to set sharing on a video within an organization?

I'm working on an app that uploads private videos to Youtube to be viewed by everyone at our organization. Luckily, Google and Youtube have an awesome company-wide permission for this, which allows for anyone with an email address within the company to view these videos.
Youtube has 3 options for video privacy status: Public, Unlisted and Private. I'd usually just go with Unlisted and call it a day, but due to the nature of these videos, I'd prefer for them to Private, then manually grant access to the video and share it with everyone at the organization. When done through the Youtube Video Manager page, here is the dialog box I'm looking for an API endpoint for:
Manual Approach
We can go through each video and check this box in each video, but that's not something that scales well. I'd love to find documentation on a Youtube API endpoint that handles this. There's a clear status.privacyStatus attribute for videos that can be set to private, public or unlisted, but nothing for this.
Does anyone know of a Youtube API andpoint to control this permission for private videos on Youtube?
I can back up the assumption from my comment that private video sharing is not possible through the Data API v3 with this article I found on the topic.
The author of the article even provides a workaround to this problem, although I strongly discourage using it, since it requires parsing sensitive account information (password) in PHP. Apart from that, the code is from 2010 and will most likely not work anymore because it is from before YouTube channels were linked to Google+ pages.

Downloading captions using Youtube v3 API

While attempting to download captions for a video (not owned by me) using OAuth 2.0 authorization, I am receiving a 403 Forbidden error which states "The permissions associated with the request are not sufficient to download the caption track. The request might not be properly authorized, or the video order might not have enabled third-party contributions for this caption." On further research, I have found other people also faced the same issue as this, and have not been able to download captions unless the video was uploaded from their own account.
Is there still no possible way of downloading a caption track from a video? How exactly do sites like keepsubs(dot)com, manage to do this then?
Captions: download documentation
Authorization
This request requires authorization with at least one of the following
scopes (read more about authentication and authorization).
Scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.force-ssl
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtubepartner
The owner of the video will have to authenticate your application using Oauth2 with one of those scopes.
The V3 API doesn't allow this. You would have to make a request to youtube, load the javascript, turn subtitles on, then look for the https://www.youtube.com/api/timedtext request.
It uses a signature, key, and some other items in the query string that the request will fail without. You can make the request to the timedtext endpoint from the server using any http requestor.
Other thoughts: You might be able to get that request to be loaded automatically by having subtitles automatically turned on in the query string somehow. This would make your life a lot easier.
You could also try to replicate how they create the key and signature, and then just create it yourself. I bet it uses the video id in some manner.

How to use YouTube API for an iOS app?

I have searched the web for tutorials and instructions but could not find any on this... So I was hoping maybe someone here can point me in the right direction or just link some good tutorials. (By the way I am willing to make a basic YouTube client app which lets the user search for videos and than watch them...nothing too fancy).
Thanks in advance!
Oh buddy.... welcome welcome to the world of parsing JSON files and putting up with BADLY documented APIs :)
Well I was looking into this a few months ago and I managed to get it working. Here are the things you have to do:
Step 1 - OAuth 2.0 Integration
Will your app allow the user to login to YouTube so that they can comment/like/etc... videos? If so, then you will need to get the user to login to the YouTube API via your app first before they can do these kind of things. In order to do that, your app will need to use OAuth 2.0 to communicate with the YouTube API. Here is a superb library which you can use to authenticate with the YouTube API via OAuth 2.0: https://github.com/BHughes3388/BAHYouTubeOAuth
Step 2 - Keychain - Access Token storage
If you are new to OAuth authentication, then it can be daunting at first, but once you play around with it and familiarize yourself with it, you will realize that it is very easy to work with.
So overall, the way it works, is that your app contacts the API (in this case YouTube V3 API) and requests a webpage. The webpage allows the user to login to the APi and grant your app access. Once this has been done, the API will send your app an "access token". This token will need to be used in all (or most) of your API requests (it depends on the type of request).
Once you have obtained the "access token" you will then need to store it securely. Its basically a password, so you need to keep it safe. Do not do what some people do, which is to use NSUserDefaults, that is not secure at all. Instead you will need to use Keychain. This is Apple's secure encryption/storage library which can easily be used to save secure strings such as passwords.
In order to use Keychain to securely store and retrieve the "access token" when you need it, take a look at this SO post, its great: How to use Keychain for saving password like GenericKeychain sample code
Step 3 - YouTube API V3 - https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/
Right so now, the harder bit. You need to read through the Google YouTube API V3 and go through the API reference documents to find the specific URLs which will return the data you are looking for. For example: if you want to get a list of videos from the home feed of a user or from a simple search, then take a look at this API reference page: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos/list
Step 4 - Extract the video URL
Before I talk further about this step, I should mention that Google says you should present videos in a simple webview with YouTube HTML code which simply embeds the video view in your app. But in my opinion (and many other devs), this looks and works horribly....
So if you want to display YouTube video in your app via the native MPMovieplayerController, then you will need to extract the video URL first before you can do this.
When you make a request to the YouTube API for a set of video(s), you will get a JSON file back, this file contains a list of videos (videoIDs, titles, dates, etc....).
You will need to parse the JSON file for the video IDs. Once you or the app user has selected the video that they want, you will need to use then pass the video ID for that particular video to a "YouTube video link extractor" library. This library will then return a set of video file links for that video. These links can be used in conjunction with MPMovieplayerController to display the video natively.
Here is a great YouTube video file url extracter - https://github.com/runmad/RMYouTubeExtractor
Good luck :)

Get YouTube playlist videos anonymously

I would like to display a list of videos from a YouTube playlist in an intranet application.
Is it possible to get the list of videos from a YouTube playlist using the Data api (or any other way) without requiring the user to login?
Everything that I have read so far in the YouTube data api requires the user to be signed in to authenticate.
unfortunately, you can't access youtube data API with anonymously user.
Your application must have authorization credentials to be able to use the YouTube Data API.
The Developers Console associates your credentials with the APIs that you indicate that your application will use. Note that the Developers Console does not allow you to select the YouTube Data API (v2). However, authorization credentials for the v3 API will also work for the v2 API.
If possible, you should actually use YouTube Data API (v3) rather than the v2 API in your application. The YouTube API blog explains some of the benefits that the newer API offers, and we have added a year's worth of additional functionality to the API since that blog post!
related link : https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_oauth2#OAuth2_Client_Side_Web_Applications_Flow

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