How to Download Videos from Screencast or YouTube to Play on Your Phone

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I download videos from Screencast or YouTube to play on my phone while I'm offline.

Like many of you, I have a limited cellular data plan, so I really try not to stream videos lest I use all of my monthly data in a couple of hours.  That said, I'm on the go a lot -- driving my kids or myself around -- and I'd like to be able to play some videos offline.  My main impetus for figuring this out is that I'm in a graduate program that has a distance-learning component and some of my professors upload their lectures to video sites that don't have a built-in way to save those videos for offline viewing.  Some of these videos are a couple of hours long and I'd like to be able to listen to them in the car without having to use up all of my data on streaming.

Let me be clear that I do not use this as a way to steal copyrighted data, which would be illegal.  In fact, once I'm done listening to the lectures, I delete the material from my phone and computer just to be extra careful.   I also do not share any of these downloaded videos.  Creators deserve to be recognized for their material and most video services have a way to share content that ensures the creators get the requisite amount of credit.  This is simply a way to view these videos without having to stream them over a cellular network.  

The tool I use is found at the website tubeoffline.com.  Most of my professors use a site called Screencast to house and share their video lectures, but you can see that this also works for a bunch of other video platforms including YouTube, Reddit, KhanAcademy, and Twitter.  Again, be conscious about copyrighted material and how you are sharing the works of others.

So, I find Screencast in the list and click on the link.  This takes me to Tubeoffine's specific Screencast page, which gives me a field to enter a link.  Okay -- now I pop back over to my video here on Screencast, copy the link, and paste it into this field.  So, I'm fine with the conversion format default - normal quality and MP4 file type, but you can also change these if you have a different preference.  So, I hit the Get Video button and it takes a bit of time to access the video and pull it into this screen.  Now I click on the Download button, which brings me to this screen.  What this actually does is bring up the entire video in a video player that allows for downloads.  So, now I hit these three dots for more options and choose the Download option.

This takes a little while depending on the length of the video, but eventually it downloads the video in MP4 format into my default Download folder. 

Now -- I've done all of this on my PC, so how do I move it to my phone so that I can view it there?  You may have a different way to do this, but generally, I upload the video to Google Drive.  My graduate school gives me a Google Drive account with unlimited storage, but because I only house these videos there temporarily, I would have plenty of storage on my personal drive account as well.  

So, I drag and drop the video into a folder on Google Drive and once it's done processing, it's available for viewing anywhere I can access Google Drive -- including my phone or my iPad.  But remember, it's still just streaming.  The final step is that I have to go onto my phone, go to Google Drive, find the video, and choose to Make it Available Offline.  Now I'm all set and ready to listen to this video as I'm driving around and I don't have to be anchored to wifi.

Does this take some time?  Yes.  But it probably took me no longer than 6m start to finish and I had almost 12 hours of lectures to watch.  It is totally worth it to me to be able to watch them where ever I happen to be.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!