Downloading content for playback later is most useful on mobile, where your connection quality is determined by your location. But there are plenty of us whose home connection isn't so great either, or who prefer to play back media on laptops that are likewise limited by location. To that end, YouTube is now testing downloaded video on the desktop for Premium subscribers.

The experimental feature was spotted by Android Police tipsters subscribed to YouTube Premium in India and France, and it appears to be available widely elsewhere. If you want to try it, head to youtube.com/new to check the Labs page while signed in, and you might see something like this:

To download a video, head to its page and click the Download button on the toolbar beneath the title.

Downloaded videos can be played back at youtube.com/feed/downloads, which is also available via the side navigation panel. It should work on Windows, MacOS, and Chrome OS. According to the text on the introductory page, this experimental feature will end its early test on October 19th.

In the settings menu you can choose to download in various qualities with 1080p as a maximum, or delete all of your local downloads from your browser cache with one button.

We can hope that it becomes permanently accessible after that, though it's possible Google might just scrap the whole thing, or wait a few months to work the kinks out after the trial run. Of course there are plenty of third-party alternatives for downloading YouTube videos (though we wouldn't try them on an unpatched browser!), if you don't want to mess with the official implementation.

Thanks: Samarth