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I have an HTC Desire, and the default YouTube app does not cache the video after it plays the first time. The second time you play, it downloads the same video a second time, but I would like to cache the video on the memory card.

Is there any way to do this with the default YouTube app? If not, is there a third-party app that can do something like this?

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  • For all down-voters of this question and for all people who think as thinks @Chance: each computer caches videos of youtube, and you can watch them 1000000 times, until you don't close the browser's tab. Where are the problems with download?
    – Narek
    May 26, 2011 at 6:13
  • It's possible that the android client differs from the desktop behavior in part because the android activity lifecycle means there's no sense of a "session" - how/when should it know to clean up the cache files, which they probably hope casual users won't find? Set a timer so it can run a cleanup task 10 minutes after you've last viewed anything?
    – Chris Stratton
    May 26, 2011 at 19:09

2 Answers 2

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Google's YouTube app has an option to preload videos that are either in a channel you are subscribed to or that are in your "watch later" list. I haven't tested this but I think it will keep a video that you have preloaded cached for a while after you watched it for the first time.

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  • They removed this option shortly after the answer was posted. It's supposed to be coming back but the rollout may be staged by where you live. India will be first, ostensibly because pulling a video over the cell network there is not a good solution.
    – James B
    Oct 3, 2014 at 8:58
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I would think, that videos are not cached because of memory constraints on mobile devices.

Software developers have to design and implement software that works for the great majority of users. Perhaps adding an intelligent (device agnostic) cache function is not on the top of functionality they want to implement right now.

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    -1, if the phone can cache the video while it's playing it can keep it cached after it finishes until the user exits the application or views a different video.
    – Matthew Read
    May 26, 2011 at 23:18
  • I don't know of any device that currently caches the whole video, the devices that I know do a read ahead. When you skip ahead by more than the buffer size, I have to buffer again. When you skip back, I have to buffer again. Do you know any device that behaves differently?
    – bjoernz
    May 27, 2011 at 4:15
  • The YouTube app is not device-specific as far as I know. I can start a video, pause it while it loads, and then jump to any part of the video without it buffering.
    – Matthew Read
    May 27, 2011 at 16:21
  • On my device (Samsung Galaxy S with Froyo) the YouTube app only buffers about 20 seconds into the future.
    – bjoernz
    May 27, 2011 at 16:44
  • That's interesting ... I have a Galaxy S Vibrant with Froyo. Do you have the latest version of the YouTube app?
    – Matthew Read
    May 27, 2011 at 17:00

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