While I do appreciate that feature, it's also very spotty. More than once I downloaded something only to later find that it won't play when I'm offline on a plane. Also, whenever Youtube decides to ban or suspend a video, it automatically disappears from the downloads area as well. Plus, this requires a mobile device, which is not necessarily where you may want to watch these things.
The war on general purpose computing is strong. The RIAA has been at the forefront of restricting & preventing user freedoms since time immemorial.
Only this time, unlike with Betamax[1], they are winning. Backed by anti-circumvention laws like the DMCA section 1201, which makes any lock, no matter how poorly built, a criminal violation to break or even to build or discuss ways of breaking.
Hint: if on Android, Firefox will allow you to do that anyway, even allowing you to do other things on your phone with YT playing in the background. And with uBlock, you won't even get ads.
Periodically the downloaded videos become unavailable offline if you don't have an internet connection to refresh them. Maybe once a month or something. Which means you can't hold on to a video through their service indefinitely.
The downloaded videos likely have time constraint applied to them that can be updated when the app connects to the Internet. I don't think the downloaded videos can be played outside of the app.
Oh, it’s app only? That would already be a pain. I think they got into a good groove of saving URLs for later downloading. Needing to load each one on a tablet is ruining the automation of them visiting a friend or sitting in a cafe, socializing and downing a few dozen gb via youtube-dl just hitting a list of URLs in the bg.
There are no exceptions except for things like paid TV shows (not clips, actual TV shows and movies you can pay for[0]) - you can download any video and, as said in the sibling comment, it only expires after 30 days of being offline.
The "normal" app yes, but there is another one called Youtube Go, which you can download and save the video on your phone, IDK if it´s avaliable worldwide.
