TikTok downloader, explained

Not by us. We read the file list from the post's own public metadata and stream the one you pick straight through, byte for byte. No watermark is added, no frame is re-compressed, and no branding is burned in.

TikTok publishes a real quality ladder — typically 1080p, 720p and 540p of the same clip, each encoded separately at upload time. All of them are listed, highest first, and every one of them is a file TikTok already had.

Nothing is upscaled. If the creator filmed on an old phone and TikTok's best pass is 540p, 540p is the ceiling, whatever another site claims about 4K.

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The top row, unless you have a reason not to. It is the highest pass TikTok published, and each button states its own size — 1080p · 3.4 MB — so the trade-off is visible before you commit to anything.

Those sizes come from TikTok's own payload rather than from a guess or a probe request, which is why they can be shown instantly.

One genuine oddity you may notice: a lower-resolution row is occasionally a *larger* file than the row above it. That is real, not a bug in the listing. TikTok encodes each pass independently and sometimes gives a 540p version a much higher bitrate. The rows are ordered by resolution because that is what people are choosing between; the sizes are shown so you can spot the exception.

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Because TikTok decides how many passes to publish, and how much of that it will show a visitor who is not signed in.

• The full ladder comes from the post's own page. When that page loads normally, you get every pass with its size.
• When TikTok answers our server with a verification page instead — which it does to server addresses fairly readily — we fall back to its embed player, which is a different surface that has to serve public posts to third-party websites. That one publishes a single rendition and no sound, so one row is the complete set rather than a sign something is missing.
• Live broadcasts have no finished file at all until they end and get posted to the profile.

Where several passes exist, all of them are listed. Where one does, inventing a second row would be a lie dressed up as a feature.

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Yes. Every video row is a complete file with its audio muxed in — TikTok's renditions are self-contained, so there is no separate-tracks trap to fall into here the way there is on some other platforms.

The sound is *also* offered on its own, as an extra row, for when you want the track without the picture. Having both does not mean the video row is missing anything.

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Video is MP4. Audio is .m4a — see the question about saving just the sound for why that is the right name rather than .mp3. Slideshow stills are JPEG.

Getting this right takes a little care on TikTok, because its media URLs carry no file extension at all: the path ends in an opaque object key. What the URL does carry is a mime_type parameter, which is what the extension is read from.

As a backstop, the download proxy also reads the Content-Type of the response and names the file from that instead if the two ever disagree. So the extension always matches the actual contents rather than a prediction — you never get a file your phone refuses to open.

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Descriptively, so a downloads folder stays navigable. The name is built from the creator's handle, the post id, and the quality:

• username-7234567890123456789-1080p.mp4
• username-7234567890123456789-540p-watermark.mp4
• username-7234567890123456789-2-1080x1350.jpg

The quality is in the name because a post offers several, and two files with identical names would defeat the point of offering a choice. The watermarked copy gets its own marker for the same reason — it sits at the same resolution as the clean version, so without it the two would collide in your downloads folder and the second would silently become "file (1)".

Slideshow slides are numbered in playback order. Handles are flattened to plain letters, digits and hyphens to keep the filename portable across operating systems.

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The proxy declines files above 512 MB. TikTok caps a post at ten minutes and encodes for phones, so this is a guardrail rather than a limit you will meet.

There is no in-page progress dialog by design: the file is handed to your browser's own download manager, so you get the indicator you already know, and nothing is buffered in a tab's memory where a large video would fail on a phone.

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No. Every download is piped from TikTok's CDN through to your browser as it arrives. Nothing is buffered to disk, nothing is written to a database, and there is no archive of past downloads to leak or subpoena.

That is a structural property, not a promise about our intentions: the proxy has no storage layer to write to.

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• Resolved post metadata — the handle, caption, media URLs, duration — for about ten minutes, so looking up the same link twice does not hit TikTok twice. It expires on its own.
• Rate-limit counters, cleared at the end of each one-minute window.
• Ordinary web server access logs, kept for as long as the host's default, for abuse investigation.

No media, no accounts, no download history. The privacy policy spells out the same list in more detail.

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Not for the download itself. Your browser asks our server, our server asks TikTok, and the bytes come back through us — so TikTok sees a request from this server, with no referrer or fingerprint of yours attached, and nothing appears in your TikTok activity.

On TikTok that indirection is not only a privacy choice, it is what makes downloads work at all. Its delivery hosts refuse a request that does not arrive with a tiktok.com referer, a range header, and the session cookies from the page fetch that produced the URL. A link handed straight to your browser would simply be rejected — which is why any tool that gives you a raw CDN URL tends to hand you a 403 instead of a video.

One deliberate exception: the preview thumbnail in the results panel is loaded by your browser directly from TikTok's CDN, with a no-referrer policy. It keeps the page fast and the bandwidth honest. Blocking images for this site removes that connection without affecting downloads.

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No analytics scripts, no advertising trackers, no third-party pixels, and no cookies at all. In particular there is no TikTok pixel on a site about TikTok, which would be a strange thing to have to explain.

One value is written to your browser's local storage: whether you prefer the light or dark theme. It never leaves your device.

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It is worth being direct about what that contains, because it is more than a link: the source of a signed-in TikTok page includes session tokens and your own user id.

So it is read once, parsed for media URLs, and dropped. It is never logged, never cached, and never written anywhere — and unlike an ordinary lookup, the result is not stored under the post's id either. It goes under a random token instead, precisely so the next visitor who pastes the same link cannot be handed a video they are not allowed to see.

The textarea is also cleared as soon as you press Download another, so a few megabytes of your session does not sit on screen after you are finished with it.

If that still makes you uncomfortable, do not use that page. It exists for posts an anonymous request genuinely cannot reach, and the ordinary field on the homepage never asks for anything but a link.

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A TikTok download that fails has almost always failed at the link rather than at the file. The error message on screen names the specific cause. In order of how often they come up:

• The link points at a profile or a /live page rather than at one post.
• The account is private, or the post is restricted to followers. If you can already watch it while signed in, the private downloader page handles that case by reading page source your own browser fetched.
• The post was deleted, or the id in the link has a typo. TikTok tells us this outright in its payload, so this error is reliable rather than a guess.
• The post is age-restricted, or region-locked to somewhere this server does not run. No downloader can change either of those.
• TikTok asked this server to pass a verification check. That one is temporary and about us, not about your video — the tool already tries a second fingerprint and then its embed player before giving up.

The errors are read from TikTok's own status codes where possible rather than from the wording on the page, which means they stay correct regardless of what language TikTok decides to answer in.

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Not by pasting the link here. This downloader fetches the post from our own server with no session, so it sees what any logged-out visitor sees — and a private account's posts are not that.

There is a second path for posts you can already watch, and it works the other way round: you open the post in your own signed-in browser, copy the page's source, and paste that in. We never sign in and never ask for your password, because the fetch is done by the browser that already has access. The private downloader page walks through the three steps — it is linked in the header as Private.

What neither path does is get past an audience setting. If TikTok does not show you the post, its page source does not contain it either. The same goes for a story: those are served only to signed-in accounts, and if it is your own, the TikTok app can save it directly.

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TikTok's CDN URLs are signed and time-limited, and they are also tied to the address that resolved them. If you leave a results page open for a while, the links behind those buttons go stale even though the page still looks fine.

Run the lookup again to mint fresh ones. Nothing is wrong with the video or with your link.

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There is a per-address cap of twenty new lookups a minute, and a separate, much looser cap of a hundred and twenty downloads a minute. Saving every slide of a slideshow plus its sound is nowhere near the second one.

Both exist to stop one scripted client from burning through TikTok's tolerance and getting this server throttled for everybody. TikTok is unusually quick to react to bursts from a single address — a handful of requests in close succession earns a 503 — so the cap is protecting your next lookup as much as anyone else's.

The message tells you how many seconds remain.

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Each upstream request is given twelve seconds before being abandoned, so a hung connection cannot leave you staring at a spinner.

This is almost always transient. Try again; if it persists for several minutes, TikTok is likely having a bad time rather than your link being wrong.

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Not without their permission. The creator who uploaded it owns it, and a download button does not transfer that.

This matters more on TikTok than almost anywhere else, because reposting other people's clips without credit is common enough to have a name. Removing the watermark specifically to pass a video off as your own is exactly the use this tool is not for — and TikTok's own systems are reasonably good at spotting it.

What it is for: saving your own uploads at full quality, keeping an offline copy of things you are allowed to keep, and reposting with permission — which is what the watermarked row is there to make easy.

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Only with a licence from the rights holder. Advertising, client work, paid content, and monetised compilations all need permission, and "it was public" is not a defence.

Sounds are their own separate question, and a harder one: a TikTok sound is frequently a commercial music recording, licensed to TikTok for use inside TikTok and nowhere else. Saving it does not extend that licence to you.

If you are unsure whether your use qualifies, that is a question for a lawyer rather than for a download page.

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There is nothing here to take down — no copy of your video exists on this server. Files stream from TikTok's own CDN to whoever requested them and are never retained.

If content of yours is being hosted or redistributed somewhere else, that host is the effective place to file. Our copyright policy explains what we can and cannot act on.

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