YouTube introduces “click to download” option

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 18 January 2009 14:57

Opinion and Analysis

Although there are a zillion ways to download YouTube videos to your computer, YouTube has finally started rolling out a “click to download” button on some of its videos, with a wider rollout said to be on the way.

Lawrence Lessig’s site brings the news that YouTube is already letting people download some videos from its site as .MP4 files.

One video you can see this button right now is at a President-Elect Barack Obama YouTube video. This video is one of his weekly addresses where he talks to US citizens (and the world) on what he plans to do to fix the economy once he’s actually inaugurated as President.

This particular clip downloads as an 18mb MP4 file, and while I strangely couldn’t get video to display using the Media Player Classic (of K-lite codec fame), it played perfectly in Windows Media Player, which in this instance is the one in the Windows 7 beta that I’m currently trying out.

Lessig states that he’s told the “download” option will be more widely rolled out, but as one commenter at his site notes, will this extend to music videos?

Clearly there will be some video clips that won’t get the “click to download” option, and for these, the other existing methods of downloading YouTube videos will still apply.

One simple way to do it is to install Real Player, which has come with the ability to easily download YouTube videos for some time now, although a plethora of other software programs and even websites will help you with your YouTube video download desires.

Whether the download option will expand to allow users to download low, medium and high quality versions of each clip is yet to be seen – currently you only seem to have one choice, which is whatever YouTube decides.

Another commenter at Lessig’s site notes that YouTube’s terms and conditions state that video clips can’t be downloaded, so perhaps the download option will be quite limited, or perhaps the T&C’s will need to be changed.

Still, it’s a nice development, and nice to see it coming direct from YouTube (for some videos) at last.