Platform guide
How to download Reddit videos with yt-dlp
Reddit-hosted video has one famous quirk: the video and audio live in separate streams, which is why videos saved through other means arrive silent. yt-dlp handles the merge for you — as long as you give it the right URL and have ffmpeg installed.
Quick answer
yt-dlp "https://www.reddit.com/r/sub/comments/abc123/title/"Pass the comments-page URL of the post, not the raw v.redd.it link. The post page carries the full metadata and extracts more reliably; a bare v.redd.it URL sometimes resolves, but the post URL is the dependable path.
Why Reddit videos "have no sound" everywhere else
Reddit hosts video on v.redd.itas DASH streams: one file for the video track, a separate one for the audio. Anything that just grabs "the video file" gets the silent track — that is the whole mystery. yt-dlp downloads both streams and merges them into a single file, but the merge step requires ffmpeg. If ffmpeg is missing, follow the ffmpeg fix guide first.
Crossposts resolve to the original
If the post you found is a crosspost, yt-dlp follows it to the original post and extracts from there. That is the behavior you want — the original carries the actual media — but it explains why the file you get may be named after a different subreddit or title than the page you started on.
NSFW and quarantined subreddits
Age-gated and quarantined communities can refuse anonymous requests. If a post extracts in your logged-in browser but fails in yt-dlp, pass your session along:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome "https://www.reddit.com/r/sub/comments/abc123/title/"The mistake to avoid
If your downloaded Reddit videos come out without audio, do not file it as a yt-dlp bug or start swapping format flags. It is almost always a missing-ffmpeg problem: yt-dlp fell back to a single stream because it could not merge. Install ffmpeg and rerun.
Recurring sources
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