For creators
Get your own uploads
back in full quality
The drive died, the laptop got replaced, the project files are gone — but the video is still up. Pull it back at up to 4K instead of the 720p YouTube Studio hands you.
Up to 4K
Not capped at 720p
Any channel
No login needed
Unlisted too
URL is enough
Audio apart
WAV or MP3
Why creators end up needing this
Almost nobody keeps every master. Drives fail, laptops get traded in, an editor moves on and takes the project files with them. The upload survives all of it, which quietly turns a public YouTube channel into the only surviving copy of years of work.
The obvious answer is YouTube Studio's own download — until you try it and find it returns 720p no matter what you uploaded. For a re-edit, a showreel or a client deliverable, that is not a usable archive.
When this is the right tool
- Recovering a lost master — the file is gone, the upload is not.
- Repurposing old footage — pulling clips into a new edit or a short.
- Archiving before a change — a rebrand, a channel handover, a takedown you expect.
- Extracting the audio — reusing an interview or voiceover as WAV.
What you will not get
Your original file. YouTube re-encodes everything on upload and discards the master, so the best available copy is still a derivative of what you sent. Any tool claiming to return your original is describing something that no longer exists on YouTube's servers. What you get is the highest rendition they serve — which for archiving and re-editing is usually enough.
Whole channels
SnapMedia handles one URL at a time. For a full back catalogue, the command-line tool yt-dlp is the better recommendation and it is free — we would rather say so than sell you the wrong shape of tool. Come back here when you want a few videos without installing anything.