Two rows for one video, and how to tell them apart

The player fetches two files and plays them together

When you watch a long upload on YouTube, the player is holding two connections open. One brings the moving image and the other brings the soundtrack, and the player keeps them lined up so closely that nobody watching would guess there were two.

Analyze reports what is published, so the list shows the same split. Neither half is damaged and neither is hiding the other. The arrangement exists so a viewer on a poor connection can drop to a smaller picture without touching the audio quality.

YouTube often separates picture and sound into different streams. Results can show silent video rows, audio-only rows, and combined MP4 rows. Choose a combined row when you want one file that already holds both halves.

If a saved file has picture and no sound, you took a video-only row. Run Analyze again and pick a row that lists both, or take matching video and audio only if you plan to mux them yourself.

Reading a row and knowing which half it is

Two figures on each row settle the question in a second, and no guesswork is involved.

Once you have read a few lists this becomes automatic.

• A height figure such as 360p, 720p or 1080p means the row is picture.
• No height figure and a size several times smaller than everything else means the row is sound.
• The sound row on a given upload is usually the smallest line in the list by a wide margin.
• Two picture rows at the same height with different sizes are two encodings of the same image.

The row that already holds both halves

YouTube also publishes a small number of files with the image and the soundtrack packed together, because simpler players cannot fetch two streams and synchronise them. Those rows exist at the lower and middle heights on most uploads.

That is the row to take when you want a file that plays on anything with no further work. It costs some quality against the top of the ladder, and it saves you the job of joining two files afterwards. Where an upload is short, the whole list is frequently made of these rows and the question never arises.

Diagnosing a file that plays silently

A saved video with a perfect picture and no sound is not a fault in the file. It is a picture row doing exactly what it was published to do.

Check three things before doing anything else. Confirm the volume on the player and the device, because a muted app produces the same symptom. Look at the file size against the row you chose, since a picture row is the large one. Then reopen the list for that address and look for a row carrying a height figure in the range where combined files sit.

When the combined rows stop below what you wanted

On a long upload the combined rows run out partway up the ladder, so a 1080p or 2160p file exists only as picture. Wanting the top quality and wanting a single playable file are then two different wishes.

You have three honest choices. Take the highest combined row and accept its quality. Take the picture row and the sound row separately and join them in software on your own device, since nothing is re-encoded here. Or take the sound row alone where the talking was the point, which is a small file and finishes quickly.

What the split means for the free limits

Each finished file counts separately. Taking a picture row and a sound row for one video spends two of the three downloads that free use allows in a day, and that count returns at midnight UTC.

The 150 MB ceiling also applies per file rather than per video. A picture row on a long upload passes it while its matching sound row sits at a few tens of megabytes. Pro removes the ceiling, the count and the advertising, and the sizes on every row are printed before you commit to anything.

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

Related pages

• Row sizes on a very long upload
• Reading a results list row by row
• Keeping the soundtrack on its own
• Another site that splits picture from sound