YouTube now has a new experimental feature that allows desktop users to download videos to their devices for offline listening.
If you are a YouTube Premium subscriber, you can go to YouTube Expiremintal Feature Page to enable this function. Note that if you do this and have the Picture and Picture (PiP) experiment enabled, it will be disabled. This sucks, and since the PiP feature is more useful to me, I hope YouTube will fully implement it soon.
The ability to download videos probably doesn’t sound very useful to anyone with a desktop computer, but Chromebook and laptop owners may find it appealing. One possible use case is queuing some sick YouTube content for long car rides or other outings.
Google says that anyone with the latest versions of Chrome, Edge, or Opera can use the new feature, but it enabled a download button and folder in Edge in my testing and it didn’t work. Chrome asked me to download the YouTube web app and from there I was able to get the feature to work.
Once the feature is enabled, you can download videos by clicking a download button next to the Like and Share buttons on the action bar. You can also click the three-dot menu from any of the more navigable pages to download content.
Overall this is a pretty solid update and like the PiP feature on iOS I’m still stumped that these aren’t rolling out to everyone and should instead be opted for by YouTube Premium members.
Source: Youtube