Dailymotion video downloader

One address, a ladder of encodings

Dailymotion publishes a general catalogue rather than clips from one kind of poster, so uploads arrive at every quality and the host re-encodes each of them into a set of sizes. Analyze reports that whole set. A single video address commonly comes back as four or five rows, each with a resolution and a size in megabytes.

Those rows are separate files, not one file described five ways. The taller rows carry more picture information and weigh more. The shorter rows are the same footage encoded smaller. Nothing here converts between them, so the row you press is the file you receive.

The tallest row is not automatically the row to take

People reach for the top row out of habit and then wait for a file they gain nothing from. The deciding question is the screen the video is going to end up on.

• Watching on a phone: a middle row looks the same on that display and saves you most of the megabytes.
• Playing on a television or a large monitor: take the tallest row the results list offers.
• Keeping a lecture, a match commentary, or anything where the sound carries the value: a lower row is enough and finishes sooner.
• Editing the footage afterwards: take the tallest row, because an editor cannot restore detail a smaller encoding never held.

The ceiling belongs to the upload, not to this page

An old upload that was recorded at 480p has no 1080p row, and no downloader produces one. What the results list shows is what the host holds. When the tallest row is shorter than you hoped, the original upload is the reason.

Length matters as much as height. A ten-minute clip at the top row usually sits inside the 150 MB free ceiling, and a full-length programme at the same height passes it. Free use also covers three downloads a day. Pro removes the daily limit, removes the size ceiling, and removes advertising.

Channel pages, playlists, and the video page itself

What you paste has to resolve to a single video. Open the video so it has the page to itself, then copy the address out of your browser bar. A usable one carries the short identifier of that single item after the video path.

A channel address, a playlist address, a topic page, or a search result covers many videos at once, so no single file sits behind it and the results come back empty. Open the item you want first. Where a video is embedded in a news article, the article address works as well, and the video page address is the more direct thing to paste.

Titles the host will not serve to every country

Rights on this host are sold country by country, so broadcasters restrict some uploads to particular territories. A video that plays where you are sits behind a regional block somewhere else, and our servers make the request from where they are rather than from your chair.

That produces the one confusing result on this host: the video runs in your browser and the results list comes back empty. Nothing on this page changes where the request originates. The same empty answer follows a video that has been deleted, and a video whose owner has switched it to private.

What you are allowed to keep

Uploads on a general host come from broadcasters, studios, independent creators, and ordinary people, and each of them owns what they posted. A copy for your own viewing is one thing. Re-uploading it, cutting it into your own production, or selling anything built from it needs the owner's agreement.

Vidzilla is an independent site with no relationship to Dailymotion and no ability to grant rights over material hosted there. The terms you accepted on that site continue to apply to you.

Related pages

• More on saving a Dailymotion video
• Choosing between resolution and file size
• Saving video from a Vimeo page
• Keeping a Rumble upload as a file
• What the MP4 rows in a results list mean