Downloading a long video from a link

What is different about an hour of video

The steps do not change. You paste the link, press Analyze, and pick a row from the list of files the page is serving. What changes is the size of what you picked. A three-minute clip at 1080p is a few tens of megabytes. The same encoding of a ninety-minute recording is measured in gigabytes, and every part of the run after your click is governed by that number.

The size in megabytes on each row is the figure to read before you press Download file. It tells you what the transfer is going to involve far better than the runtime does, because a talking-head recording and a fast-moving match of the same length produce very different files.

Transfer time follows the file, not the runtime

The download is a plain file transfer. On the same connection, a file four times the size takes roughly four times as long. A one-hour recording does not take one hour to save; it takes as long as its megabytes need on the line you are using.

Analyze itself stays quick on a long video, because reading which files a page serves does not involve reading the video. A long wait at the Analyze stage points at the source being slow to respond, not at the length of the recording.

The tab stays open until it finishes

Leave this tab open for the whole transfer, the same as any other browser download. Closing the tab, closing the browser, or letting the machine sleep ends the transfer partway through, and a partial file of a long recording will not play to the end.

On a laptop, put it on power and turn off sleep before starting a multi-gigabyte row. On a phone, keep the browser in the foreground while a long file writes to storage. You can work in other tabs and other windows in the meantime; it is this tab that has to survive.

When a lower row is the better trade

For long recordings the choice between rows costs real time and real storage, so it is worth a second of thought rather than reaching for the largest row out of habit.

Match the row to how the recording will be watched. Nobody studies the grain in a two-hour conference talk.

• A recorded talk, panel, interview, or class: a middle row is enough, and the file is a fraction of the size of the top row.
• Sport, action, or anything you will pause on a large screen: take the top row and accept the transfer time.
• Something you will re-edit: take the top row, because a lower row was encoded at a lower bitrate and re-encoding it again will show.
• A talk you plan to listen to rather than watch: take the audio-only row when the source publishes one. It is a small file even at three hours.

Long sources that need a different link

Long video often lives on pages that are not a single video page, and that is where an empty result comes from. A link to a series, a season, a course, or a channel of recorded streams holds many videos and no single file to save. Open the individual recording and copy that address.

A stream that is still live has no finished file behind it yet. Wait until the broadcast ends and the site publishes the recording, then copy the address of that recording.

If a long transfer stops early

A transfer that ends short leaves a file smaller than the size printed on the row you picked. Compare the two numbers first: that comparison tells you whether you have the whole recording or part of it.

Start again from Analyze rather than reusing the old list, and pick a lower row for the second attempt. A smaller file spends less time exposed to a dropped connection, a sleeping machine, or a source that stops serving partway through.

Related pages

• Downloading from a link, step by step
• Resolution and bitrate explained
• Keep the audio of a long talk
• The free size ceiling
• Pages Vidzilla can read