Like, press the "Download" button and pay for Premium?

YouTube Premium doesn’t let you download the video file.

Even if you do it from a browser, it is only accessible from the YouTube website run offline as a SPA.

Even then, downloaded videos can only be played for 29 days before having to reconnect most of the time, with some regions restricting it to 48 hours.

I would totally buy Premium subscription if they let me download the videos, and I told Google that. The way it is now - no deal.

Meh, Google know that nobody would pay for that as a selling point when it only applied to a third of videos, and they will never get copyright clearance from third parties for more than that.

I think you misunderstood what I said. I would gladly pay premium/subscription for videos that are OK with it. I don't care about those that don't, they just won't get my subscription.

I think parent means the YouTube app. On iOS (and android/chromos?) you can actually download videos and watch them offline if you got a premium membership. But then the videos are under control by the app.

Yes, and I replied to that. It’s not really an alternative to an actual video download.

It’s not the raw video file, you can only access it from the app or website, and there’s restrictions on how long you can be offline before the app/website will stop you from watching it.

You can't get .mp4 though. It's there somewhere inside YT app's persistent storage but there is no "share" button for it.

Premium is not available worldwide.

I tried to trick google by creating an account using VPN in Europe. I even managed to subscribe for Premium. Even with an active Premium subscription Youtube app won't let me use its features such as downloading, background play and picture in picture (you know, basically everything)

Because "you live in the wrong part of the world". Creating a problem, selling the solution is what they do.

Like, I don't even care about downloading, but Google intentionally cripples their mobile website experience by suppressing pip and background play. It would cost zero dollars not to do this but they did.

wow! just use a real computer and be done with it. this reads like some normie complaining to his isp because the wifi sucks.

drop yt-urls into mpv with ytdlp backend, works for like a decade barring the occasional breakage of ytdl.

Most of my grievances are related to mobile experience so I'm not sure why are you talking about mpv.

I barely have any problems in desktop because issues like no pip and background play just don't exist there.

Not sure what part of not using your suggested command line tools but wanting to just use the official version like everyone else warrants calling someone openly stupid

Baffling they enforce those fake restrictions in parts of the world the product to enable them doesn't exist.

The fact Apple allows Google to resell their multitasking and PIP features as part of their own subscription is pretty un-Apple.

A very long time ago, I've worked on a Perl script to do just that ( https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=636777 ). Of course the problem with this sort of scripts is that they keep chasing behind changes youtube makes precisely to prevent video downloading.

Yes, by injecting my own userscript using my (judging by WEI not for long) USER AGENT. I dont even screw around reimplementing their signature/n decoding/throttling functions, I grep for player.js match(/(?:player\/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\/)?(?:html5player|(?:www|player(?:_ias)?))[-\.]([^/]+?)(?:(?:\/html5player(?:-new)?)?|(?:\/[a-z]{2,3}_[A-Z]{2})?\/base)\.js/), then grep in that for relevant functions and call those directly. You could say that from YT perspective everything is 100% kosher, its their own DRM functions unlocking .mp4 link for me :)