Getting the link into the box cleanly

The box expects one address and reads it literally

What you paste is treated as a single web address to be opened. It is not searched for, corrected, or guessed at, so an address that is complete works and an address that is missing a piece reaches nothing.

That literal reading is what makes the paste step worth two seconds of attention. Analyze can only work with the characters in front of it, and the characters in front of it came from your clipboard exactly as they were.

Spaces at the front and the back

A double-tap or a triple-click on a link in a message often takes the space next to it as well, and pasting into a phone keyboard can add one afterwards. Leading and trailing spaces are stripped before the address is opened, so a stray space at either end does no harm.

A space in the middle is a different matter. Web addresses contain no spaces, so a gap between two halves means the copy picked up a line break or the sender typed the address by hand. Close the gap so the address forms one unbroken string.

A selection that stopped short of the end

Dragging across a long address is where most partial copies come from. The selection ends where your finger or your cursor stopped, and the remainder is left behind on the page.

A truncated address still looks plausible in the box, which is why the failure is confusing. The end of a video address is normally where the video is actually identified, so cutting the last characters turns a link to one video into a link to a section, a home page, or nothing at all. Copy links by their built-in command rather than by dragging: long-press the link on a phone and choose the copy option, or right-click it on a desktop and copy the link address.

An address broken across two lines in a chat

Messaging apps, email, and terminal windows wrap long text to fit the width of the window. A wrapped address is displayed on two lines and is still one address underneath, and copying it usually brings the line break along.

Rejoin the halves with nothing between them, not with a space. If the second half begins with a slash, a question mark, an ampersand, or a plain letter, it belongs directly against the end of the first half. An address shown with three dots in the middle is a different problem, because those characters were never part of it and the missing text cannot be typed back in. Copy that one from the underlying link instead of from the visible text.

Punctuation the message wrapped around the link

A link pasted inside a sentence often arrives carrying the sentence's punctuation. A full stop, a comma, a closing bracket, or a quotation mark sitting against the last character belongs to the writing, not to the address.

Remove those trailing characters before pressing Analyze. Everything else that looks unusual inside the address is part of it and stays: slashes, hyphens, underscores, percent signs, and long runs of letters and numbers are all normal in a video address.

Capitals and characters a keyboard replaced

Phone keyboards capitalise the first letter of a line and swap straight quotation marks for curly ones. Retyping an address by hand invites both.

The part of an address after the host name distinguishes between capital and lower-case letters, so a changed letter points at a different thing or at nothing. Curly quotation marks and long dashes are not valid address characters at all. Pasting a copied link avoids every one of these, which is the argument for copying rather than typing.

The look at the box before you press Analyze

Read the start and the end of what you pasted. The start is http followed by the host name, with no words in front of it. The end is the last character of the address, with no punctuation from a sentence and no gap.

When those two checks pass, press Analyze. Vidzilla opens that address, reads the media the page serves, and returns a row for each file with its resolution and its size in megabytes.

Related pages

• Copying a link on a phone or a desktop
• What the part after the question mark does
• The kinds of links that produce a file
• Turning a link you were sent into a video file