YouTube to MP4: The Downloaders Reddit Recommends
"YouTube to MP4" sounds like it needs a converter. It usually doesn't — and understanding why is the single most useful thing Reddit threads on this topic teach. Get it right and your MP4 is pixel-identical to the original; get it wrong and a converter site quietly re-encodes your video, caps it at 720p and hands back something blurrier than what you watched.
What "to MP4" actually means
YouTube already stores video in MP4-compatible formats. For anything above 720p, though, it keeps the video track and the audio track as separate streams. A good tool downloads both and repackages them into one MP4 file without touching the picture — that's called a remux, it's fast, and it loses nothing. A lazy tool grabs a lower-quality combined stream, or worse, re-encodes the video on their server. That's why so many converter sites top out at 720p: it's the best quality that exists as a single ready-made file.
The Reddit answer: yt-dlp, told to prefer MP4
The consensus tool is the same one as for YouTube downloading in general: the free, open-source yt-dlp. By default it may save some videos as .webm (a different container, same idea); if you specifically want MP4, one flag settles it:
yt-dlp -t mp4 <video URL>
That tells yt-dlp to pick MP4-compatible streams and merge them into an .mp4 file, at the best quality the video offers — 1080p, 1440p, 4K, whatever exists. No re-encoding, no watermark, no cap.
Without the command line
- Stacher (desktop, free) — yt-dlp with a settings screen; set the output format to MP4 once and forget it.
- Seal (Android, free) — same engine on a phone; downloads land straight in your gallery.
- cobalt.tools (web, free) — the rare paste-a-link site with no ads and no fake buttons. Fine for one-offs; it won't do playlists.
- 4K Video Downloader (paid) — polished MP4 output, but the free tier is limited and playlists cost money.
How to spot a converter site you shouldn't use
- It "processes" or "converts" for a long time — that's a server re-encoding your video, which only ever loses quality.
- The best offered quality is 720p — see above; the site is doing the least possible work.
- Multiple green Download buttons — only one is real; the rest are ads dressed up as buttons.
- It asks you to allow notifications or install a "codec" — close the tab.
One boundary worth keeping
All of this applies to public videos. Paid, DRM-protected streams — YouTube Movies, Premium-only content — are a different category: getting an MP4 out of those means breaking the protection, which none of the tools above do and this site doesn't help with. If you paid for it, watch it in the app; if a creator published it free, the tools here will save it faithfully.
Looking for the same paste-a-link simplicity on other platforms? hhhdownload does exactly that for Reddit (with the sound merged in), Pinterest, Streamable and more — free, no app, no sign-up.