IssueTracker

Thanks for the report!

Unfortunately you can't specify a height or width for video files at the moment, and the 'dv' parameter returns a downsampled version of the video. There is currently no option to retrieve the video in its original resolution.

I have forwarded this to the team and will update here once I hear back.

Thanks

The documentation should be updated then?

https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/access-media-items#video-base-urls

If specifying a video width or height is not possible the sentense "with your required dimensions:" makes no sense then.

Thanks - Good catch, I'll get the documentation updated. (The previous sentence is quite explicit, but we must have missed this one.)

Is there a separate ticket for adding the ability to download full resolution video? Or does this documentation ticket also cover that? I want to make sure I'm tracking the correct ticket so I'll know when that feature is added.

Re #5, we can track this here. I have renamed the title of the issue to capture this.

Not sure if this works (or is fool-proof), but I tried reverse-engineering this based on the URLs I see in Google Photos directly, and in Picasa. My hunch is, if you pass the attribute "=m37", you might get a higher resolution video. How I tracked this down is:

1. Go to Picasa's API for showing your albums: https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/YOUR_USER_ID_HERE?kind=album&prettyprint=true. Find the album you are looking for, in the element <gphoto:id>xxxxx</gphoto:id>. Note that this album id is different from your Google Photos album id.
2.  Now look at your album via Picasa's API: https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/YOUR_USER_ID/albumid/YOUR_ALBUM_ID?kind=photo&prettyprint=true. Find the video you are looking for (you can search by title etc.).You will see the following defined:
        <media:content url='https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/dummy-image-url=m18' height='360' width='640' type='video/mpeg4' medium='video'/>
        <media:content url='https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/dummy-image-url=m22' height='720' width='1280' type='video/mpeg4' medium='video'/>
        <media:content url='https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/dummy-image-url=m37' height='1080' width='1920' type='video/mpeg4' medium='video'/>
Specifically look for those items where the type='video/mpeg4'.

If you observe the URLs you will see that they have the same URL with a different suffix: =m18 for the smallest resolution, =m22 for the medium resolution, and =m37 for the highest resolution. This is what I see in my albums; you might see something else. What I have found, though, is that if I simply append "=m37" to the URL shown in Google Photos API, it seems to neatly bring me a good resolution video.

Product Team,
Is my hypothesis correct? Or am I completely off-base?

One more thing - I got the idea of looking at the Picasa API because in the preview page of Google Photos I saw that the small preview of my video was suffixed with "=m18", and I had seen that while I was working with the Picasa API.

Re #8 Adding "=m37" works for me in a browser but gives me a 404 when calling the API.

Furthermore, requesting 'https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/[video-baseUrl]=dv' now results in an Error 400 (did work before for low-res videos) - do I just leave that here, or do I open another issue?

Please do not use any flags that are not documented on the "Access media items" guide in our developer documentation: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/access-media-items

Undocumented flags are not supported and should not be used directly. If you have a use case for other types of encoded or processed video, please do file a new feature request, describing your use and any technical requirements.

How is this a feature request, this is clearly a bug. The dv link should download the full resolution just like the documentation states and also its a minimum functionality of getting a media item. Currently there is no way to download the video so the feature is broken. Please update the bug type and priority.