There is a lot of demand for knowing how to download YouTube videos, and it seems that YouTube is well aware of this and is ready to actually allow it. The only problem with this legal YouTube video download method is that there are a few caveats.

The news comes from a tipster who wrote to Android Police that they are a particular member of YouTube Premium - a service that offers offline downloads and an ad-free YouTube experience on mobile devices - as part of Labs testing revealed that they have access to this new feature.

Unfortunately, not all YouTube Premium members will have access to this feature. That's because tipsters have reported from India and France, and YouTube may be testing the feature in certain regions; Android Police claims that "it appears to be widely available in other regions."

To check for yourself, go to the address in http://youtube.com/new while signed in to your YouTube Premium account and see if the Labs feature "Download videos from your browser" is available. We checked and found that the only Labs feature available is "iOS Picture-in-Picture", which in our testing proved to be (at best) buggy.

Another major caveat is that it does not download the actual file to the desktop or downloads folder, although it is probably trying to prevent this feature from replacing dubious services, sites, and apps that let you download YouTube videos.

Instead, just like the YouTube app, when offline, the browser addresshttp://youtube.com/feed/downloadsでこれらの動画を見ることができる。

YouTube is trying to find ways to stop piracy of creator-generated content on the desktop, just as it does on mobile It seems. Getting things done in the browser is similar enough to the in-app experience that one wonders why there is no YouTube app for Windows or macOS yet.

If YouTube ever made it possible to actually create .MP4 files of videos on the site, you can bet you'd have a big fight with people posting videos on YouTube.

Although YouTube Premium members do not see ads, if videos could be saved and viewed offline outside of the YouTube site (e.g., on a VLC video player), the number of views of YouTube videos would likely decrease. And that is something YouTube clearly wants to avoid.