IMO, removing download button as a mean to make downloading harder is laughable. Most people intuitively right-click image to download the image, so by now everyone knows they can also download video and audio by right-clicking them too in any browser.

If you are serious about protecting your content, you should use xhr/fetch api and blob api (used by Youtube and other online video providers).

We are also facing the same issue. We want to make video download harder and provide obvious choice to download. We could hide the download button in web using the stackoverflow solution but it is still visible in mobile browser.

For our app, it's not about preventing downloads - I don't care about that. The real issue is that the UI was changed in unexpected ways, and now we're getting support calls asking why this button won't work as expected. (Our app has a custom feature for saving video, and this new button doesn't work for that.)

This new feature caused a bug in our app and dissatisfied and confused customers. I don't have time to write custom controls until 2017, so we're screwed until I can do that or we can have an API for hiding this UI.

New controls should not just magically appear with no good way to remove them! Please provide an API to fix this. Specifically, make this work:

video::-internal-media-controls-download-button {
    display:none;
}

#5 - you can use  issue 650174  for this, as this one is closed. And if you could show the problem (a screenshot, or a screencast), that would help, because I could not the exact issue this button has caused for you.

This is very critical issue.
Our many clients complain to us.

Has any completed solution?

Our many content providers complain about this button.
We tried to remove this, but it doesn't works at all. (psudo codes)

I don't understand why this button made it. (Even many webview app does not work)

#7, #8:

Please comment on and vote for  issue 650174  since this issue is closed. Voting will help get attention.

I've lots of jobs, and i have to deal with this bullshit issue...

Thank you!!!

#10, #11 - please, keep it civil.

Whereas I understand if someone really wants your media they will get it, however this download button appearing out of nowhere infers 'permission' to do the download which is not the case on my site. We need to be able to disable this, and also make sure there are broadcasts on the side of building before you make changes to a HTML5 tag of this nature

Please, add as many buttons as you want to the player, so we'll have more options to CUSTOMIZE it... But also, please provide a simple way to hide buttons we don't want.

Suppose a site has permission to play an audio file, but not to distribute it. This can hurt more than just the originating site. Yes, there are many tools already available to download media, but we shouldn't give a free pass for border line 'illegal' downloads.

The simple solution would be to enable css styling... At least the ability to set to 'display:none'

video::-internal-media-controls-download-button{display:none;}
video::-internal-media-controls-cast-button{display:none;}
...

Same problem here. We aren't free to offer downloads, even if it's trivial to get the file anyway.

"Let me liberate that content for you" this is what it feels like to this content creator Google. We disable right-click on our work, but of course this does nothing on mobile. Please provide a way to disable this.

How can chrome include the download button without the option to disable it? It is really strange, Please allow some legit method to disable the download button. 

Please fix, I need to disable the download button for audio.

This is very much weird. We have proprietary videos which we are loading in chrome app. We dont want user to download the video.

video::-internal-media-controls-download-button{display:none;} not working for me.

#20 - it is not supposed to work.
See https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/chrome-58-media-updates#controlslist for a way to remove the download button, supported in Chrome 58 onwards.

So how is OP a problem for users again ... ? 

Has anyone tried adding controlsList="nodownload" to the video tag as shown below? Worked for me, hopefully, will work for you all. 

<video controls controlsList="nodownload">

I will try the solution in Comment 24 but for me, the issue has to do with download options. I provide a download button. When the user clicks it, it asks them which codec they want (mp3, aac, vorbis, opus) defaulting to aac. A cookie remembers it for other audios they want to download.

With the download button in the chrome media player, the user can't choose, and what the browser is playing may not be the preferred codec for the user's library.

Hopefully the solution in Comment 24 works, I don't want to have to use a custom interface just because it makes downloading the right codec confusing. I prefer to use the browser supplied interface, it's what users are use to.

Okay Comment 24 does not work in Chromium 58 from EPEL for CentOS 7. Hopefully that is just chromium devs needing to catch up.

Also would be nice if the audio interface shows a captions button when there are track elements (like it does for video) - not sure why it doesn't (Safari and FireFox do). It does seem to support the textTrack object. Am I going to have to use controlsList for that too?

Correction - in Chromium 58 it seems to work with the Video element but not the Audio element. Weird.

#27 - works for me using Chrome 59 -
data:text/html,<audio src="https://www.soundhelix.com/examples/mp3/SoundHelix-Song-1.mp3" controls controlsList="nodownload">

#26 - you should probably file a new issue for the missing captions options on <audio>. Commenting about a new feature/bug is less likely to get noticed.

#26, I agree with phistuck: you should probably file a bug for this and please CC me. I would be interested to understand the use case I was in the assumption that text tracks for audio elements wouldn't really be useful.