When Google launched the Android One phones in India in September, it said it was working on a way to make YouTube videos accessible offline. Basically, the plan was to allow users to download videos when they had network for offline viewing.
Yesterday, the company said that the feature to download YouTube videos for offline viewing on an Android phone or tablet was available.
So how does it work and how can you save a YouTube video for offline viewing? Follow the steps:
1-- Update the YouTube app on your phone. This you can do by going to the Play Store app and then checking the YouTube app.
2- Once you open the updated app, it will tell you that the support for offline viewing has been added.
3- Under the videos available for offline viewing -- not all are available -- you will see an extra button to download them.4- Clicking on this button asks users about the resolution that want in the downloaded videos. 360P and 720P are available. 1080P is not available, at least at the moment. You can also set the default resolution. The lower resolution video consume less data as well as take less space on the internal storage.
5-- By default videos are downloaded when the phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network. But you can go into the YouTube Offline settings (it can be accessed from the slider menu on the left), you can change it.
6- Once a video is downloaded, it is saved under Offline category. When the phone is connected to a network all YouTube categories are available. But when it has no data connection, only Offline category is available. You can click on any video saved in Offline category and it will play.
Can you copy offline YouTube videos from your tablet or phone to other devices or a computer?
Given how easy it is to copy stuff from an Android device to a computer, can you copy the YouTube videos downloaded for offline viewing into your laptop? No, you can't, at least for now. And the reason why you can't is because Google is using a unique way to save these videos on Android phones. Here is what we feel is going on:
1-- Google is using EXO file format to save videos. This is apparently a file format used for system files and while we managed to copy these EXO files onto a computer, it can be apparently played only through the YouTube Android app.
2-- When you request a download for an offline video in the YouTube app, the video is downloaded in chunks. For example, a 3-minute file we downloaded was saved in five parts. It is possible that only the YouTube app for Android can make sense of these chunks and join them together.
3-- We also feel there is real-time encryption going on here. When the video is downloaded, not only it is broken into parts but is also converted to EXO format, compressed and encrypted in real time. This has several benefits, the one obvious benefit is that people can't copy-paste the video and share it indiscriminately. The compression, meanwhile, saves space on the disk. For example, the 3-minute long video that we downloaded actually consumed around 40MB data. But when stored on the phone, the video took only around 25mb space.
4-- When a user plays the video, it is decrypted in real time. It is possible that only YouTube's app can do this decryption.
5- If you share the offline video using Bluetooth, instead of the actual file, a web link to the video is sent to the recipient.
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