Video Downloader

Is it legal to download videos from the web?

It depends on three factors: who owns the content, what license it carries, and what the hosting platform's Terms of Service allow. Content you uploaded yourself is yours to download. Public-domain content and Creative Commons-licensed content is downloadable within the license's terms. Copyrighted content is, by default, not yours to copy without permission from the owner, and many jurisdictions recognize a personal-use / offline-viewing carve-out but that is narrower than most people assume. On top of copyright, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok explicitly prohibit downloading in their Terms of Service, so even legally-ambiguous personal use can be a ToS violation that the platform may act on.

Why does this tool not work for YouTube or Instagram?

Both platforms actively obfuscate their video URLs to break third-party download tools. YouTube uses a dynamically-generated signature cipher that must be deciphered against JavaScript from the player, which changes regularly; Instagram uses short-lived signed URLs that expire within seconds. A browser-based tool with no backend cannot keep up with either arms race. Specialized command-line tools like yt-dlp maintain their own reverse-engineering of these platforms and update on days-to-weeks cycles — they break periodically when the platforms change behavior. Use yt-dlp for those platforms, only on content you are legally entitled to download, and accept the ongoing maintenance burden.

What types of videos can I actually download with this?

Direct MP4 links embedded in standard <video> HTML tags work reliably. Open Graph og:video meta tags used by most non-DRM content sites work well. Simple HLS (m3u8) and DASH (mpd) manifests without token authentication work for most content. Videos hosted on your own site or on platforms that deliberately expose their streams (Internet Archive, many academic and government sites, some podcast hosts) are the sweet spot. Large social platforms, paid streaming services, and anything behind a login wall generally will not work because those use authentication tokens, DRM, or URL obfuscation that this tool does not attempt to break.

Can I download entire playlists or channels?

No. This tool is designed for one video at a time and does not walk playlists, channels, or related-video graphs. That kind of bulk extraction is precisely the pattern platforms aggressively rate-limit and block, and it is the pattern most likely to run into Terms of Service enforcement. For content you legitimately need in bulk (your own course back-catalog, your archived work from a platform that is shutting down), contact the platform's support team first — most offer an official data-export mechanism that gives you the files legally and in bulk, without the fragility of unofficial extraction.

Does the downloaded file include audio?

For direct MP4 sources with embedded audio tracks, yes — the file downloads as-is with video and audio interleaved. For adaptive streams (HLS / DASH) where video and audio are often served as separate tracks for bandwidth efficiency, the tool muxes the selected video quality with the best-available audio track into a single MP4 container during download. If the source deliberately separates audio and video streams with different protections (DRM on audio but not video, or vice versa), the result may be video-only or audio-only, in which case the tool surfaces that limitation rather than producing a silent file without warning.