videoChartNotFound error for some video categories

Question

API calls https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videoCategories?part=snippet&regionCode=US&key=API_KEY can retrieve a list of available videoCategory for certain country.

For example, videoCategory id 43:

However, when i retrieve video by this videoCategory id 43, for example https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet%2C+contentDetails&chart=mostPopular&regionCode=MY&videoCategoryId=43&key=API_KEY, i get error instead:

At the first glance, i thought it was due to assignable is false, but it's not the case, because some videoCategoryId which was assignable=false can retrieve videos too.

videoCategoryId id 30, assignable is false:

videoCategoryId 30 have no problem to get videos:

Search API is ok(some categories return only ~2 videos), for example this API calls, https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=id%2Csnippet&maxResults=20&order=relevance&videoCategoryId=43&type=video&key=API_KEY:

I'm not sure it's bug or not. Because it's possible videoCategory id 43 is not under mostPopular chart and lead to this error. But how is it possible to detect and filter it out on videoCategories resource API? there's no flag to indicate this category cannot work with video resource API.

Answer 1

I ran into this as well, and it seems that the bug is that "Movies" and "Trailers" should be set as assignable. Per this, https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videoCategories, if a category is assignable it has videos associated with it. So it makes sense that retrieving videos for non-assignable categories would fail, but it does not make sense that those two non-assignable categories do, in fact, have associated videos (although "Trailers" only returns one result, which is strange).

I suppose a temporary workaround is to just include assignable categories, and manually include movies and trailers.