Three families of source, and how each behaves

Sorting an address into a family before you paste

Almost everything pasted here belongs to one of three groups: a short post on a social network, a page on a site whose business is hosting video, or an address that points straight at a file.

The grouping is not academic. It predicts how long you wait, how many rows come back, and what the file weighs, and knowing that in advance keeps a normal wait from looking like a fault.

Social posts: quick to read, quick to arrive

A post carrying a clip is read in a few seconds. Those pages are built to load fast on a phone, and the media they publish is easy to identify.

The result is short. A social clip typically runs under a couple of minutes at a modest height, so the list is one or two rows measured in single or double-digit megabytes. The transfer to your device is over almost as soon as it starts, and the free ceiling of 150 MB is nowhere near reached.

Video hosts: a slower reading, then a wide ladder

A page on a dedicated video host takes longer to read. The player is assembled by script, the page is heavier, and the server has to run that work before there is anything to list.

What comes back is the widest list you will see here. A host that re-encodes every upload publishes several heights and sometimes separate audio, so the ladder runs from a small low row up to a large top row. Most of your decision-making happens with this family, because the range between the smallest and largest row is enormous.

Direct file addresses: almost no reading at all

An address that ends in a file extension names the file itself. There is no page to open and no player to assemble, so the reading stage is close to instant.

The answer is a single row, because a single file exists. There is no choice of height, and the size on that row is whatever the person who uploaded it produced. These addresses are also the ones that turn out very large or carry an expiry, since a file put online directly was not prepared for a streaming ladder.

Where the wait actually goes in each case

Two stages make up every wait, and the families load them differently. Reading the page dominates on a video host. Transferring the file dominates on a direct address, where the file is often the largest of the three.

A social clip loads neither stage heavily, which is why it feels instant. When a wait surprises you, work out which family the address belongs to and the length of the wait explains itself.

What the free limits mean for each family

The limits are the same across all three: three downloads a day, one file under 150 MB, and the count returning at midnight UTC. The families meet those limits at different distances.

Three social clips barely register against the ceiling. Three top rows from a video host can each sit close to it, and a long recording passes it. A direct file address is the one that exceeds it outright most often, since nobody encoded it down for streaming. Pro removes the count, removes the ceiling, and removes the advertising.

What all three have to be before any of this applies

Public. A social post behind a private account, a host page behind a subscription, and a direct file behind a sign-in all return the same empty list, because our server is served the same wall a stranger would be served.

The other shared requirement is that the address names one item. A profile, a category, a playlist, or a folder listing has no single file behind it, whichever family it belongs to.

Related pages

• One address field for many kinds of source
• Which websites can actually be read
• Addresses pointing at something other than video
• What free use covers and where it stops