Download video from a link — no software, no account

What to know before you download

FoxyFile works with publicly available video: if the recording opens in a browser without signing in and without a subscription, it can be saved. There is nothing to install — the link is read on our side and the file goes straight to your browser downloads. No intermediate archives, no emails, no waiting in a queue.

How it works

Three steps, with nothing in between them:

• Copy the page address — the one in your browser's address bar, or the one behind the Share button in the app. Short links like youtu.be work too;
• Paste it into the field and wait for the read. It usually takes one and a half to three seconds: that is how long the site takes to answer with its list of tracks;
• Pick a quality and press Download. The file starts flowing immediately, with no step in between.

What downloads and what does not

The line falls on exactly one thing: does the recording open in a browser for a stranger who never signed in? Everything that does, the service will save; everything else it will not, and no setting changes that.

• Works: ordinary videos, Shorts and vertical clips, recordings of finished live streams, music videos, video inside posts and feeds, youtu.be links and addresses carrying a timestamp;
• Does not work: private and unlisted recordings, anything behind a subscription or a paywall, video inside closed communities, live streams while they are still running, recordings the rights holder has deleted, and anything restricted to another region.

Live streams are a case of their own: a running broadcast has no end, which means it has no file yet — there is nothing to download. A few hours after it finishes the site usually publishes the recording, and that saves like any ordinary video.

Formats and qualities

The list depends on what the site itself offers, so it differs from one video to the next. A YouTube clip usually carries two or three dozen tracks, of which we show the meaningful ones: one per resolution, plus the audio.

• MP4 — the universal format, opens on any phone and any computer. Take it if you are unsure;
• M4A and MP3 — audio only, for a lecture or a podcast to take with you. Ten to twenty times smaller than the video;
• WEBM — sometimes better quality at a smaller size, but not every player understands it and almost no TV does.

What it is good for

There are only a handful of reasons people look for a service like this, and they are all about being offline or about editing:

• Travel and flights. A lecture, a podcast or a series downloaded in advance plays without a connection. For anything spoken the audio track alone is enough and weighs a fraction of the video;
• Editing and quoting. A fragment of someone else's clip is needed as source material, and the editor cannot work from a link — it needs a file on disk;
• Slow or metered internet. Downloading once is steadier than streaming the same thing ten times with buffering and reloads;
• The recording may disappear. Videos get deleted, channels get closed, streams drop out of reach. A local copy of an open recording does not depend on any of that.

Why some sizes are approximate

On YouTube, anything above 360p keeps the video track and the audio track separately — that is how the platform works, not a choice of ours. We join them into a single file while the download is running, so the final size is only known approximately and the browser shows an indeterminate progress bar instead of a percentage.

For 360p and audio the file is ready as a whole: the exact size is known and a broken download resumes.

We deliberately do not draw a percentage where we do not have one. A bar that climbs to ninety and freezes is worse than no bar at all: it promises something nobody measured. In its place you get the megabytes received and the current speed — enough to see that the process is alive.

Why downloads are sometimes slow

The speed is set by the site. Across a measured run of eight YouTube clips the spread was 0.3 to 30 Mbit/s while all eight extracted successfully: same connection, same service, a hundredfold difference. The limit is applied to the session as a whole rather than to a particular format — on a “slow” clip 4K, 360p and the audio track are all equally slow.

The practical conclusion is simple: when a download crawls, switching quality is pointless. Retrying a few minutes later usually is not — by then the site tends to serve the file at a normal speed.

Why a video may fail to download

Refusals come in four kinds, and the wording of the error tells you what to do:

• The site took the request for a bot. The restriction is temporary and has nothing to do with the video itself — it usually lifts within a minute. Retrying is enough;
• The video is unavailable in our region. The rights holder limited it by country. We cannot work around that, and we do not try;
• The recording is private or subscriber-only. The service does not open such content — it works with public material only;
• The site changed how its pages are built. This happens after updates on their end. It is fixed on our side, usually within a day.

How this differs from an extension or an app

There are three ways to save a video, and each one has a price. We are not going to claim a browser service beats them all: it has a weak spot, and naming it outright is the honest thing to do.

• A browser extension is convenient because the button appears right on the video page. The price is access to every open tab: an extension with those permissions sees your mail and your bank too. Extension stores regularly purge downloaders whose ownership has quietly changed;
• A desktop app gives you batch downloads, resuming and the highest qualities without compromise. The price is installation, updates, and the fact that a work or borrowed computer simply will not let you install it;
• A browser service asks for neither installation nor permissions: open a page, paste a link, forget about it. The price is that the file travels through someone else's server, and the speed is bounded by that server's connection.

Hence a simple rule: if you need a video once a month, take the browser service — installing an app for that is not worth it. If you pull down dozens of clips a day, install the desktop app, which is exactly what it was built for.

We do not store your files

A downloaded video does not stay on our servers: the stream runs from the site to you through the service and is written nowhere. This is not a promise in a privacy policy but the shape of the service — there is simply nowhere to put files, as no disk is allocated for them.

For the same reason we keep no history of links and ask for no registration — the site has no accounts at all.