YouTube to MP4
Convert any YouTube video to MP4 in 1080p, 720p, or 360p — with the file size shown beside each option whenever YouTube reports it.
No account · No software · Any device
Same video, three very different files. The ranges below move with how much motion a video has — a static podcast set sits at the low end, a drone chase at the high end.
20–35 MBper minute
A 10-minute video ≈ 250 MB
Only exists when the upload itself was 1080p — no tool can invent resolution.
10–18 MBper minute
A 10-minute video ≈ 130 MB
4–6 MBper minute
A 10-minute video ≈ 50 MB
Quality notes
The comparison above gives you the numbers; here's the reasoning behind them. The right resolution depends on the screen, not the video. On a phone held at arm's length, 720p and 1080p are close to indistinguishable — the pixels are physically too small for your eyes to separate. On a 24-inch monitor or a living-room TV, the gap is obvious, and 1080p earns its extra megabytes.
Content matters as much as screen size. A talking-head interview survives 360p fine, because faces compress well and barely move. Fast sports and text-heavy coding tutorials don't — motion smears, and small type turns to mush. When there's fine detail you need to read, go up a tier.
Match the resolution to the screen you'll watch on, not to the biggest number on the list.
MP4 is a container, and the version we serve carries H.264 video — the most widely supported codec ever shipped. Effectively everything made since 2010 plays it natively: phones, smart TVs, car head units, game consoles, and PowerPoint on the meeting-room laptop.
YouTube itself often streams WebM with the VP9 codec instead. It's genuinely more efficient — roughly 20–30% smaller at the same quality — but device support is patchy. Your TV might handle it. Your car's head unit almost certainly won't.
As a YouTube to MP4 converter, we default to MP4. Slightly larger files, zero "format not supported" errors. That trade is worth taking every single time.
If the uploader's original file was 720p, then 1080p doesn't exist anywhere — not on YouTube, not here, not on any downloader with an honest interface. Nobody can conjure resolution that was never recorded, so the option simply won't appear in your list.
Very new uploads are the other case. YouTube processes low resolutions first and the higher ones minutes to hours later, so a video published twenty minutes ago may only show 360p for now. Come back in an hour and the full list is usually there. And to be plain about one hard limit: we can't download private or members-only videos at any resolution — here's the full list of what won't download, and why.
MP4 is the default for a reason, but it isn't always the answer. If it's an hour-long interview you'll listen to on a run, the picture is dead weight — convert it to MP3 instead, and a 700 MB video becomes a roughly 55 MB audio file. Still weighing it up? MP4 vs MP3 lays out when each one wins.
Vertical clips are their own case. The Shorts downloader keeps the 9:16 portrait frame exactly as uploaded, instead of squeezing it into a widescreen box where black bars do most of the work.
Sometimes you don't need the video at all, just its cover image for a slide deck or a page of notes — the thumbnail downloader grabs that image in every size YouTube stores.
And if you're not sure what you want yet, start at the main YouTube downloader: paste any standard link and it lays every format out side by side, video and audio together. First time saving to a phone? The step-by-step guide shows exactly where files land on Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone.
Paste the link above, and we pull the available MP4 renditions — 1080p, 720p, and 360p when the upload has them — with each file size shown before you download. No app or account; it runs in the browser on any device.
Match it to the screen. On a phone, 720p is usually indistinguishable from 1080p and roughly half the size; on a TV or a desktop monitor, 1080p is worth the extra megabytes. Save 360p for videos where you mostly need to hear what's said, like lectures and recorded calls.
Plan on about 20 to 35 MB per minute at 1080p, depending on how much motion the video has. A 10-minute video usually lands around 250 MB, and an hour can pass 1.5 GB. The same video at 720p is roughly half that size, which is why we show the figure next to each option before you download.
One gigabyte per file. Most clips sit well under it, but a full hour at 1080p can pass 1.5 GB — over the cap — so it won't go through at that resolution. Drop to 720p, where an hour is roughly 700 MB, and you're comfortably inside the limit. If a file is too big, you'll see a note asking you to pick a smaller quality.
Usually because the uploader's original file wasn't 1080p, and no downloader can add resolution that was never recorded — we only list what YouTube actually stores for that video. Brand-new uploads are the other cause: high resolutions finish processing minutes to hours after publication, so trying again in an hour often fixes it.
Almost certainly. We serve H.264 MP4, the most broadly compatible video format there is — smart TVs, car head units, game consoles, PowerPoint, and effectively anything made since about 2010 play it natively. That compatibility is exactly why we default to MP4 instead of the smaller WebM files YouTube sometimes uses.
Yes. Every MP4 we offer is a complete file with the audio track already merged in. Some services hand you YouTube's raw high-resolution stream, which is silent video that needs separate merging afterwards — we don't do that.
Not here, at least for now — 1080p is our current ceiling. YouTube stores 4K as separate video-only streams in the VP9 or AV1 codecs, so producing a proper 4K MP4 means merging and re-encoding on a server, which is slow and failure-prone. We'd rather hand you a complete 1080p file in seconds than a 4K job that takes minutes and sometimes breaks.
On Windows and Mac, your browser saves it to the Downloads folder unless you've changed that setting. On Android it lands in Downloads, visible through your Files app. On iPhone, Safari puts it in the Files app — tap the arrow icon near the address bar to watch progress and find it under Downloads.