The projector should not depend on the wifi
Classroom connections fail at exactly the wrong moment, and a buffering wheel in front of thirty people is its own kind of lesson. A local file just plays.
Why this is annoying today
School and campus networks throttle video
Streaming to a full room is often the one thing the network will not do well.
Sources vanish between terms
A talk you built a seminar around can be private or gone by the time you teach it again.
Adverts in front of a class
Nobody wants a mid-roll advert interrupting a lecture excerpt.
How it goes with Boo
Gather your sources
Lectures, conference talks, documentaries and openly-licensed material.
Queue them together
A whole reading list in one paste, from as many sites as you like.
Pick your quality
1080p projects perfectly well; 720p if disk is tight.
Keep them in the library
Searchable term after term, and re-downloadable if a file goes missing.
The bits that matter here
No network, no problem
A local file cannot buffer, stall or show an advert halfway through.
It survives the source
Material you rely on stays available even when the original is taken down.
Audio for transcription
Pull talks as WAV or MP3 to feed a transcription workflow.
Questions
Is downloading material for teaching allowed?
It depends entirely on the licence and on the rules where you are. Openly-licensed, public-domain and institutionally-licensed material is normally fine; most countries also have education exceptions, but they vary and they have limits. Check with your institution — we cannot give you legal advice.
Can I extract just the audio?
Yes — MP3, M4A, Opus or WAV. WAV is the useful one if it is going into transcription software.
Other ways people use it
Start with the free plan
No account, no card, no expiry. Windows 10 and 11.