How to Download YouTube Shorts in HD on Any Device

YouTube Shorts play in an endless vertical feed and there is no Save button in sight. If you want to keep a clip for offline viewing, archive one of your own uploads, or grab a reference before it disappears, you need a downloader. This guide walks through the whole process with ShortsDL, explains why some tools hand you a silent video, and covers the audio-only route too.

What you need before you start

The list is short:

• A link to the Short. Anything that points at the video works: youtube.com/shorts/..., youtu.be/..., or a normal youtube.com/watch?v=... URL.
• A web browser. ShortsDL runs entirely in the browser, so there is nothing to install on any platform.
• Nothing else. No account, no sign-in, no YouTube Premium.

The one real restriction is that the Short has to be publicly visible. Private videos, unlisted videos you do not have the link for, age-restricted content and deleted uploads cannot be fetched by any third-party tool. If a download does not go through, our troubleshooting guide covers the usual causes.

Step 1: Copy the link to the Short

You need the link to the specific Short, not to the channel page.

On the phone app:

1. Open the Short.
2. Tap the Share icon on the right-hand column of buttons.
3. Choose Copy link.

On a computer:

1. Open the Short in your browser.
2. Copy the URL straight from the address bar while it plays, or click Share below the video and then Copy.

Both give you a URL like https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dQw4w9WgXcQ. Extra tracking parameters on the end, such as ?feature=share, are harmless — they are ignored. For a fuller walkthrough see how to copy a YouTube Shorts link.

Step 2: Paste the link

Open ShortsDL and paste the link into the box at the top of the page. On mobile, the Paste button next to the field reads your clipboard for you, which saves a long press.

Press Download. Within a second or two you will see a result card with the thumbnail, the title, the channel name, the duration and a quality badge such as 1080p. That badge is the quality you are about to get — there is no menu to pick from, because ShortsDL always takes the best stream YouTube publishes.

Step 3: Choose MP4 or MP3

Two buttons sit under the card:

• Download MP4 gives you the video with its audio, at the quality on the badge.
• Download MP3 gives you the soundtrack only, encoded at 192 kbps.

Press one and the buttons are replaced by a progress bar. You will see the streams come down in megabytes, then a short Merging… step (or Converting… with a percentage for MP3), and finally Done with the file size. Your browser's normal download prompt takes it from there.

The first time you use the site, the progress bar may start with Preparing converter…. That is a one-off 32 MB download of the converter that runs inside your browser. It is cached afterwards, so every later download skips straight to fetching the video.

Why other downloaders give you a video with no sound

This is the single most common complaint about Shorts downloaders, and it is worth understanding.

Below 360p, YouTube serves one file containing both picture and sound. Above that — 720p, 1080p — it splits them: one stream carries video with no audio track at all, another carries the audio on its own. The player stitches them together as it goes.

A downloader that simply grabs "the 1080p stream" therefore hands you a silent video. Many sites work around this by giving you the 360p combined file instead and calling it a day, which is why so many downloads look soft and blocky on a modern phone screen.

ShortsDL downloads both streams and joins them back together in your browser before saving. The join is a stream copy: the video and audio data are placed into a new MP4 container untouched, never re-encoded. Nothing is lost, and for a Short it finishes in a couple of seconds. The topic is covered in more depth in YouTube Shorts video quality explained.

Where the file ends up

• Android: the MP4 lands in your Downloads folder and shows up in the Files app. Most gallery apps pick it up automatically.
• iPhone: Safari shows a download prompt and saves the file to the Files app under Downloads. From there, use the Share sheet and Save Video to move it into Photos. See downloading Shorts on iPhone for the full sequence.
• Windows and macOS: the file goes to your browser's usual downloads folder.

Files are named after the Short's title, with the resolution appended — My clip_1080p.mp4 — so a folder full of them stays readable.

What about longer videos?

ShortsDL is built for Shorts. If you paste a link to a full-length YouTube video, the site still works, but it offers only a 360p download, and MP3 only for clips of ten minutes or less. The result card says so directly. The reason is technical rather than arbitrary: the separate high-quality streams for regular videos are gated behind a token that a browser-based tool cannot obtain, while Shorts are not.

A note on what you may do with the file

Downloading a public Short for personal, offline viewing is generally accepted, but the video still belongs to the creator who made it. Re-uploading it, using it in monetised content, or stripping the credit is a different matter entirely. Is it legal to download YouTube Shorts? goes through the distinctions properly.

Quick recap

1. Copy the Shorts link from the Share menu or the address bar.
2. Paste it on ShortsDL and press Download.
3. Pick Download MP4 for the video or Download MP3 for the audio.
4. Wait for the progress bar. The file saves itself.

No app, no account, no watermark, and nothing left behind on our servers.