What file format you get back (and why it varies)

"Will I get MP4 or MP3?" is the second most common question after "why did it fail?" The honest answer: it depends what the source publishes. Grab Media does not transcode everything into one canonical format on the way out—we save what we can resolve, within limits of the pipeline.

Video containers you might see

MP4 (H.264 or H.265) is the usual case when the host serves progressive video. It plays everywhere and edits cleanly in most NLEs. WebM shows up on some open-web hosts. Fewer cameras import it natively, but VLC and ffmpeg handle it fine. Occasionally you get only a video track without audio because the site split them—see below.

Audio-only results

Podcast enclosures and music pages that only expose audio streams come back as MP3, M4A, or similar. If you pasted a video page but received audio, the host may not have offered a combined stream to anonymous clients. Check the source in a browser: if you only hear sound, that is expected.

Quality and bitrate

We do not magically upgrade 480p to 4K. You get the tier the public page made available—sometimes a single middle quality, sometimes the highest adaptive rung we can fetch without a subscriber token. For critical archival work, always keep your camera original separate from any web copy.

Thumbnails in the table

When the source exposes preview images, we show a thumbnail beside your URL in the downloads table. Missing thumbnail does not mean failure; some CDNs hide preview art from non-browser clients. The download button matters, not the picture.

After download: quick verification

• Play the first and last thirty seconds—bad merges show up at boundaries.
• Check duration against the web player; wildly shorter files mean a partial fetch.
• Import into your editor once before deleting the only copy of a project.
• Rename with something human-readable immediately.

Technical background on why some pages only expose streams: direct links vs embedded players.