We’re building a multilingual social media management tool where users connect their own YouTube channels via OAuth. Our platform allows them to dub their videos into other languages and schedule reposts across different profiles.
To make this seamless, we want to download the original video from their YouTube channel (which they own and have authorized via OAuth) without requiring manual download/upload steps.
While configuring our app’s OAuth consent screen in Google Cloud Console, we noticed this scope:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.download
User-facing label: “Download your public YouTube videos”
However, there's no official YouTube API v3 documentation or endpoint describing how to use this scope to programmatically download the authenticated user's own videos.
We’d like to know how to use this scope correctly (if at all possible) or whether it's only available through a restricted partner program.
- We added the
youtube.downloadscope to our OAuth flow. - We authenticated a user and verified the access token was valid.
- We were able to list and access video metadata using YouTube Data API v3.
- However, there is no documented endpoint or SDK method that lets us download the actual video file using this scope — even for the channel owner.
We expected there to be an API endpoint (e.g., under youtube.videos.get or similar) that returns the video file or a download URL, based on this scope. But no such method seems to exist.
We are only looking to download the authenticated user’s own videos that they have uploaded, with their full consent — nothing from other channels or public videos.
If this scope is currently non-functional or gated behind a CMS/Partner program, we’d like to understand that as well.