For those of you that like to compile collections of funny or other important videos from the widely popular YouTube service, you could be in for change. Change for the better.

For quite some time, people have been making use of miscellaneous tools to download videos from the widely popular YouTube service, but since all videos downloaded from YouTube via the freely available tools are in .flv (Flash Video) format – a format that not all video players directly support without a codec download or other special software, makes for sharing these videos to friends via email, or transferring them to portable devices a bit on the difficult side.

Videos in Barack Obama’s YouTube channel “ChangeDotGov” have a feature that no other videos on YouTube currently have – a download option. Downloaded videos from this channel are in MPEG4 (H.264) format and can be easily shared or added to your iTunes collection and even transferred and played on most portable devices.

Google had originally started to test this feature about a week ago, and now it appears that it is functional and ready to deploy around the rest of the YouTube service. The video download service was originally mentioned on Lawrence Lessig’s Blog, a Stanford University law professor and advisor to Obama.

Quoting Lessig we find the following :

“YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government.”

There is obviously a lot of room for speculation here as well. Some people believe that the video download service will be limited to user-generated videos only as to protect copyrighted content, naturally – something that shouldn’t be much of a concern unless YouTube plans to offer copyright material in High Definition.

None the less, if this new feature were to surface across the YouTube board, it would be very cool, and very handy all at once. Let’s see what happens.