What limits the quality you can actually get

The publisher fixed the ceiling before you pasted anything

A video reaches a page through an upload. Somebody exported a file, sent it to a host, and the host produced a set of versions from that one file. Every version sits at or below the quality of what arrived.

So the ceiling belongs to the source. A camera recorded at a certain resolution, an editor exported at a certain resolution, and a host processed what it was given. By the time an address exists for you to copy, the highest quality that will ever be available has already been written to disk somewhere.

Nothing in the list can rise above what was uploaded

The results list reports files that exist. Each row is a real version the page is serving, measured and named. There is no row for a version the publisher did not produce.

That is why a clip recorded on an old phone offers a 480p row and stops there. The pixels above 480p were never recorded, so no host produced them, so no row exists for them. An empty space at the top of a short list is information about the source rather than a limitation of the page you are on.

What an upscaling promise actually does to a picture

Upscaling stretches a small grid of pixels across a larger one and invents the values in between. A 720p frame pushed to 2160p has the same recorded detail spread across nine times the area, plus software guesswork filling the gaps.

The result is a much larger file that carries no new information. Edges soften or acquire a plastic smoothness, fine texture such as hair, fabric and foliage turns into smeared patches, and any compression blocks in the original are enlarged along with everything else. A label reading 4K on that file describes the grid, not the detail.

Nothing here upscales. You receive the published file, at the resolution it was published, unchanged.

Two recordings of one event can offer different ceilings

Search for a concert or a match and you find several uploads of the same moment. One was captured from a broadcast feed at 1080p, another was filmed on a phone in the crowd, and a third is a re-upload of the second with a caption burned across it.

Those three addresses give you three different ceilings. When the top row on one page disappoints you, the next step is a different upload rather than a different setting. Paste the second address and read its list.

Reading the top row for what it tells you

Two figures describe a row completely: a height in pixels and a size in megabytes. Both come from the file itself rather than from anything written on the page around it.

• A single row means the publisher produced one version, and that version is the whole of what is available.
• A tall row with a small size means the height was kept and the data budget per second was cut.
• A ladder that stops at 720p means nothing above 720p was ever published for that address.
• A row that dwarfs its neighbour holds more data per second, which shows itself during movement.

Working with high-resolution rows on free use

Free use allows three downloads a day and no single file above 150 MB. High resolution and long running time are what push a file past that ceiling, and a 1080p recording of an hour passes it comfortably.

Take a shorter clip at the top row, or the same recording one rung down, and the transfer goes through. Pro removes the daily count, removes the 150 MB ceiling and removes advertising. Keep the tab open until the file finishes writing, because a prepared file expires on a short timer.

Related pages

• Choosing between the rungs of a resolution ladder
• 720p against 1080p on the same recording
• What the 2160p row costs in storage
• Working in a browser rather than an installed program
• Using the size column to plan disk space