Pasting the address on a small screen

A one-line box holding a very long address

The field on this page is a single line. A video address runs to sixty or a hundred characters, and a phone screen fits about forty of them at a time. The field therefore shows a window onto the address rather than the whole of it.

That is worth knowing before anything else, because most of what looks wrong on a phone is the field displaying a different part of the text than the part you were expecting to see.

Mobile browsers shrink long addresses so the middle disappears. Scroll inside the field after paste, or paste into a notes app first, so you can see the host and the video id before you press Analyze.

If the field looks empty after a paste, the keyboard may still own focus. Tap outside the field once, then check that the full address is present.

Raising the Paste option with a long press

Press and hold inside the box for about a second and let go. A small menu appears with Paste in it. Choose that, and the clipboard contents drop in as one line.

A short tap does something different: it places a cursor and raises the keyboard, with no menu. If the keyboard came up and no menu appeared, the press was too quick. Press again and hold until the menu shows.

When no Paste option appears in the menu

A menu without Paste in it means the clipboard holds nothing the field will accept. Three situations account for nearly all of it.

The copy did not take, and the platform application closed before writing to the clipboard. Something other than text was copied, such as an image or a preview card. Or the clipboard was cleared by a restart between the copy and the paste. In each case the answer is the same: go back to the video, copy the address again, and come straight here without opening anything else in between.

The field that looks empty after a paste that worked

A common moment: you choose Paste, the menu closes, and the box appears to be blank. The address is in there. The field scrolled to the end of the pasted text, and the end of a long address is often a run of characters that reads as nothing much on a narrow screen.

Tap once in the box and swipe your finger left along the text to travel back to the front. Seeing https and the site name confirms the paste. There is no need to scroll back to the end before pressing Analyze; the whole value is submitted regardless of which part of it is on screen.

Keyboards that alter what you type

Autocorrect and predictive text only act on typing, which is why pasting is the route to take. A typed address collects capital letters at the start, curly quotation marks, and spaces inserted after punctuation, and each of those changes the address into one that names nothing.

If you have typed part of an address by hand, clear the field completely and paste instead. Deleting the visible mistakes leaves the invisible ones, and a single substituted character is enough for the source to report that no such video exists.

Pressing Analyze with the keyboard still up

The keyboard covers the lower part of the screen and can sit over the button. Dismiss it first by tapping the done key or by tapping the page above the box, then press Analyze.

The list arrives underneath the box. Scroll down to it, read the height and the size on each row, and press Download file on the row you want. Keep the tab open until the transfer finishes, because closing it stops the transfer partway.

Keep this tab open until the browser finishes writing the file for link to video download online. A prepared file only waits a short time before it expires from the temporary store.

Free use on Vidzilla covers three downloads a day and files up to 150 MB on video tools unless a converter page states its own quota. Pro raises those limits and removes advertising where ads appear.

Related pages

• Getting a pasted address into the box cleanly
• What the box does with the text you give it
• Downloading on an Android phone
• Working without installing anything