latest
YouTube Music now supports offline downloads on desktop
The downloads remain as long as you maintain an internet connection
If you use a streaming service to listen to music, you know that you don’t always have a steady internet connection. In these cases, it helps to have the option to download files for offline listening. Spotify, for example, allows its Premium subscribers to download individual songs to the app for offline use. Never one to be left behind from a feature parity standpoint, YouTube Music does the same automatically with its smart downloads, and even went so far as to add auto-downloading podcasts late last year. But that was all in the mobile app — now, YouTube Music is showing some love to desktop users who want to download songs for offline playback.
There are almost too many streaming apps to choose from, but most of them offer pretty similar functionality. You may prefer catching up on the best Netflix original series or your favorite creator’s latest vlog on YouTube, but all the well-established streaming services share one common feature — the ability to download content to your device, for offline viewing. Discovery+ may be rather late to the party, but now it's finally giving users in the US the ability to download shows to watch later.
If you're just about to leave the comfort of Wi-Fi to risk expensive data fees and dead zones — or, you know, get on a plane for 2 hours — you might plan ahead and download some YouTube videos to kill some time. If you're like most people, you still want to see the highest possible quality, so you might have been disappointed that YouTube caps offline downloads at a measly 720p. That may be changing as it looks like the cap will be rising to a cool 1080p in the future.
Read update
Not everybody is into live streaming gameplay, but for those that are, and particularly those that play a lot of games on Android, this week's update for YouTube Gaming was a pretty big deal. It brought much-needed support for recording and live broadcasting your screen directly to YouTube. While the update is significant for the features we now have, it also happens to include some signs for a few more things we can expect in the future. We can see a few of YouTube's newer features are going to hop over to the gaming side, including background playback, offline playback, and even Cardboard support. There are even a couple of great jokes meant just for teardown readers.
YouTube's Offline Playback feature was first introduced alongside Music Key back in November, finally giving people a way to store a (limited) selection of videos for trips into areas with poor connectivity, or just to avoid using up capped data plans. While it has remained mostly unchanged in the last 8 months, the latest update finally brings a few modifications. The interface is now a bit more informative and uniform, and there's a new low-quality option (which is actually a good thing). A teardown also revealed some big improvements to the voice command interface that has been in the works for a while.
YouTube updates have been rolling out about every week or two for the last couple of months. Most of the changes haven't been very big, but they're polishing up little aspects of the app in notable ways. The latest version bump doesn't bring significant modifications, either, but it's continuing the trend of small but visible changes. A permanent Cast button has been placed in the action bar and there are updated icons in the privacy selector for uploads. A quick teardown also reveals that we might finally be able to choose to download just the audio track for offline playback, which should make it much easier to store music for the road.
Remember when Microsoft angered legions of fans by announcing that the Xbox One would require an Internet connection to use? The company reversed that decision, but thus far, the Xbox Music Android app has functioned in much the same way. Fortunately for it, streaming music is already an established thing, so there won't be nearly as many people excited to find out that the newest version of the app now supports playing playlists offline.
There's a new version of YouTube out, and as usual, hidden inside its chocolaty center are hints at upcoming features and capabilities. We've seen information about a lot of this stuff before, some of which has even been confirmed by Google itself. Aside from the user interface changes we mentioned in the announcement post, there are framework elements for the upcoming YouTube subscription service, "Uninterrupted Playback," an offline video mode, and background music listening.
Last month YouTube announced that they were going to introduce an offline viewing option to their mobile apps sometime in November. They've since rolled out details about how it's going to work. If you add videos to your device and then disconnect it from the Internet, you will be able to watch the content for up to 48 hours. After those two days have passed, you will have to reconnect in order to watch the videos again, but the 48 hour window will refresh, and the content will remain on your device.
The YouTube team is hard at work stomping out the various interruptions that disrupt our binge video consumption. Their last major update to the mobile app introduced a sometimes awesome, sometimes annoying, picture-in-picture-ish feature that keeps the current video streaming while you search for the next one to play. Now the team is adding the ability to temporarily save videos for offline viewing. This way not even a power outage can come between you and those adorable cats.