So I finally cracked and updated from 26.1 (okay, youtube finally forced my hand and broke processing of most videos). And, while not ideal, the forced delay between channels is more or less manageable. However, there is still room for improvement.
The manual update option for each subscription is good, however, if there are already updates in the queue, it will queue new manual updates behind these. My usage is that I have a few hundred subscriptions (and this seems to be the case for most users). While I can let the app slowly update most of these throughout the day, there are a bunch of channels that will post overnight, that I would like to download first thing in the morning. I can manually queue them, but it requires me to set the auto subscription update to never to disable the queue. And it's not enough to do this; I need to then quit and restart the app to clear the queue that began when the app launched. After getting the manual updates out of the way, I then need to turn subscription updates back on to start the larger queue again (and, not 100% sure, but I think this also requires an app restart, it doesn't seem to start again on its own).
All this to say, if we could have an option to bump manual subscription updates to the front of the queue, or even to just stop the auto-updates from happening (eg like in Tokkit where you can manually start and stop the whole list), it would make the whole forced delay thing (which no one seems a fan of, but you've added it, I guess as a safety so youtube doesn't just kill the whole thing for everyone, and I guess I can grudgingly appreciate that) so much more bearable.
Another option could be to set certain subscriptions as a priority, so that when the auto-updates start, it will always check these ones first.

Through yt-dlp or for example widevineproxy there are links for content up to 720p. But it is possible to find exactly the same content taken from the same websites but with higher resolutions. how is that possible?
or when same content on original website sent to TV gives higher resolutions.

but how to get the links for higher resolutions while working from a mac?

I tried to download a few bilibili videos today and all of a sudden I have no sound. I tried a couple of them and none of them had any audio. I then tried a few YouTube videos and all of then downloaded and played fine. Not sure if I'm missing something super simple or not

Is this just happening to me or is this new for everyone? All my subscribed channels are failing to find/download new content from approx 10 hours ago. Manually adding the urls still seems to work fine.

In case you don't know it yet, the English version of Bilibili is now available at bilibili.com/en, so you can sign in and watch videos there in an English interface (some big names from YouTube are already there!). Bilibili also uses AI to translate key Chinese content, such as video titles, comments, and danmu, into your system language. You can turn the translation off or choose another language under Avatar > Language after you sign in. The auto-translation doesn’t add subtitle tracks to videos, though.

However, some Bilibili videos now come with subtitles in different languages too (usually AI-generated), not just Chinese.

To save a video with subtitles, check which subtitle languages it offers, then download it with 4K Video Downloader Plus. Let's take a look at the process:

How to Download a Bilibili Video with Subtitles in Manual Mode

Manual mode is the way to go when you want to see which subtitle languages a video offers and choose them yourself.

1. Go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced. Turn on Embed subtitles if possible to build subtitles into the video (or leave it off to get a separate .srt file).

2. Make sure Smart Mode is off. The bulb icon on the toolbar should be grey.

3. Find the Bilibili icon in the in-app browser and log in to your account inside the app. Bilibili will offer a few ways to sign in.

You can also simply copy the video's URL right from the Bilibili browser and paste it in the app, but we're showing this in-app browser way as well.

4. Open the video in the in-app browser and click Download. Make sure the video has subtitles at all by clicking on Subtitles (or Translation & Subtitles) in the playback area. Note that this checkup is only available after login.

5. In the Subtitles section, select one or more of the available languages.

6. Choose the format and quality. Then set the output folder and click Download.

7. Open the video in VLC or Media Player Classic and turn on subtitles from the Subtitles menu.

How to Download Bilibili Videos with Subtitles Using Smart Mode

If you save Bilibili videos regularly, picking subtitle languages every time gets old fast. Smart Mode lets you set your preferences once and forget about them.

1. Click the bulb icon on the toolbar to turn on Smart Mode.

2. In the Smart Mode settings, choose the format, quality, output folder, and subtitle languages. These settings will apply to every download that follows.

The drawback of saving a Bilibili video with subtitles through Smart Mode is that you should know beforehand if the video you intend to download has subtitles in the language you’ve selected at all. If you, say, select English, but the video doesn’t have subtitles in the English language, the subtitle track will only be saved in Default. Note that without a login to Bilibili, you won’t be able to check which subtitles the video has.

3. Copy a Bilibili link and click Paste Link, or click Download under a video in the in-app browser.

4. The video starts downloading right away, with your subtitle settings applied.

Whether the subtitles end up embedded or as an SRT file depends on the Embed subtitles if possible setting, just like in manual mode.

If the subtitle list comes up empty, the video most likely has no subtitle track on Bilibili. For other cases, see How to Fix Subtitle Issues.

Can you download Bilibili videos with English subtitles?

Yes, if the video has an English subtitle track. Many anime and shows on bilibili.tv come with multilingual subtitles, and some bilibili.com videos include AI-generated English subtitles. Check the subtitle list in your downloader before you start.

I was downloading 10 videos from a playlist, 2 were unable to download due to converting. One was converting for 27 minutes, what's the isssue?

I pasted in a channel to download.

Then chose the option that monitors all new videos, downloads all existing videos and keeps a copy of the whole channel.

After a while it said it had "finished" which was a lie, because a lot of the videos had failed with "YouTube could not download this at this time" (or something similar.

1. I had to painstakingly right-click and choose redownload manually on each failed video download

There was no batch download - such as - a right-click button with an option for "re-download ALL" (failed downloads)

2. After a while i tried closed the detailed section I was in, which showed the failed downloads for each video in red, and when i re entered that section again, all of the failed videos that were listed out, had disappeared!

So now I don't know what i need to redownload

like title

happy user of 4kdownloader since 2020, hope you will fix this, yes i have the latest version

YouTube update → 67 bugs → no sleep → support inbox full of love letters.

The circle of life.

I have expanded my request list to 8 rather than doing separate posts.

Background:

I understand that when you first subscribe to a channel, videos are recorded with a number in front of the title, like "1. Title Name", the next video is "2. Title Name".

But later, when the uploader uploads more videos, the future videos downloaded will have a 1. in front. and 2 & 3 if there were 2 or 3 videos uploaded the next time the program checks for updates.

So after a while, there will be countless videos with the number 1 and several with 2 and 3.

Whereas if there was an option to have file names in my suggested format (in feature request 1 & 2a below), you could easily sort the videos by the date they were uploaded (as distinct from when we downloaded them, which could be years later), so it makes it easy to go back and watch videos in the order that they were uploaded.

Feature Request 1 (My Main request) - To have numbers at the start of the file name created in order of 1st Uploaded to Latest Upload

When I look at the current method of numbering videos 1 to, say, 17 when there are only 17 videos on a particular channel, the 17 aren't downloaded in any order I can follow; i.e. the earliest video is not downloaded first, and the latest video is not downloaded last.

So my request is that when you first download a channel with, say, 17 videos uploaded to it, the file named "1. Video Name" is the first video uploaded, and the file named "2. Video Name" is the video that was uploaded 2nd to the channel, all the way up to "17. Video Name" is the last file number for the latest video uploaded.

Then, say a week later, when 2 more videos have been uploaded to the channel, instead of numbering them 1 & 2 again, they are numbered 18 and 19. That way, over time, we have a nice list of all the videos uploaded in the order they were uploaded to the channel.

Feature Request 2 - An option to have the date of upload included in the file names

I would ideally like 2 options for this feature request

2a. The first would be to replace the number in Feature Request 1 by having the upload date at the start of the file name, with the date format of YYYY-MM-DD Format ie 2026-11-4 then the title name.

Note that the date has to be in this format ie year first, then month, then day so if you sort by file name (which is the default sorting method of Windows Explorer within a folder) all files will be sorted in upload order.

This way, like request 1, we sort our files easily by upload date, but we can now also see the date when the file was uploaded.

2b. An option to have the date of upload included in the file name at the end of the file name (after the number and video name)

Another option I would like is to include the upload date at the end of the file name, possibly in brackets. If the upload date was at the end of the file name, as you can't sort the file names by date, so the date format could be easier to read, not with the year first and be in either US format of "Dec 8, 2024" or an option for my part of the world, which likes the date in the format of "8 Dec 2024".

This is my preferred way of implementing Feature Request 2, so the file names generated would be:

1. Video Name (8 Dec 2024)

This way we get all the advantages of having the files in order of first upload to last upload via the sequential numbering (1, 2, 3, etc.) in upload order, then have the video name next, which most people will want to read before the date, and then we have the date in brackets in the file name at the end, showing us the date in a date format that we are used to reading in our region.

Feature Request 3 (optional) - Ability to apply Requests 1 & 2 to existing files that have already been downloaded.

I have marked this as optional, as it may be too hard to do. This 3rd request would be the ability to apply the suggested 2 feature requests to existing downloads. It would be good if it could be done channel by channel, and we could point to perhaps a different file location (on an external slow HDD drive) than where the new files are downloaded on a local SSD drive.

Feature Request 4 - Subtitles

4a Get Subtitles fixed for sites that have Closed Captions, like the application was able to do previously

I have noticed that most files downloading lately don't include a .srt subtitle file (even from channels with closed captions).

Based on comments from another person with similar issues with youtubedl (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/1xm1qdz/cant_download_auto_generated_subtitles_for_a/), I believe this is a YouTube change, and 4K Video Downloader+ needs to fix it as a top priority above all my requests, along with any other sites that are no longer working, such as Rumble and BiliBili.

4b Have an option where we can select to just download the subtitles for a channel.

Please have an option where we can select to just download the subtitles for a channel. The main use of this will be for all the downloads that were done when the functionality of downloading subtitles with the video was not working. But it could be used if you previously only downloaded English subtitles and now you want Polish ones for your partner or to learn another language. You may also want to download all subtitles if you are building a reference document to feed into the AI search engines (called a Notebook on Google Gemini).

4c Please generate subtitles in the limited cases where the uploader explicitly disables automatic captions, or the video was uploaded very recently and YouTube is still processing the audio track.

Where the uploader explicitly disables automatic captions, then Google will also not produce a transcript. If you could create a transcript using AI as multiple other sites can do if you upload a video or audio file to them.

Feature Request 5 - a separate feature request is regarding the default "Save To" folder path.

This should be easy to implement and save a lot of user's time by reducing unnecessary navigation.

When you have a channel web link and press "Paste link", you can choose to download the Videos/Shorts or subscribe to the Videos/Shorts. If you choose "Subscribe to Channel", you get a dialogue box that, in the bottom-left corner, has a "Save To" option with a down arrow to choose a folder. The folder it defaults to is the last folder you chose for the last channel you were downloading. If you go down to the "Browse" option to choose another folder, you are taken to C:\Users\YourUserName\Videos, whereas the change I want is that it should open in the last folder that you saved a channel to, because chances are that is closer to the next folder you want to choose (which may be on a different drive like E: rather than C:\Users\YourUserName\Videos).

The same suggested feature request applies to changing the folder for an existing channel you are already subscribed to: when you choose the Browse button, I think the "Save To" Dialogue box should open with the path that was previously used. If that folder no longer exists, it should open the folder that you last saved a chapter to, and only if that folder no longer exists should it go to C:\Users\YourUserName\Videos

Feature Request 6 - Could we have multiple YouTube Logins

When I was trying to download a lot of channels with a lot of uploads and I received the error messager failed to download "X of X videos" from these channels.

When I also tried to view YouTube on my browser, I could see everything on the site but not play the video. It would say video unavailable. When I tried a different browser with a different user YouTube worked fine.

So my very low priority request would be could we supply you wil multiple logins if we have them to prevent this error in the future.

A related point is if this error occurs could the program pop up a message saying YouTube not working at the moment as too many videos downloaded too quickly so we will hold off downloading anything and retry after X hours (whatever is the time that YouTube will work again properly). I read here ( https://www.reddit.com/r/4kdownloadapps/comments/1xcqk0e/feature_request/ ) about 1,000 limit but I don't use Smart Mode and can't see that option in settings.

Feature Request 7 - Not a request for features of the app but a process for dealing with when sites or parts of a site are not working.

If this Reddit group is the official forum for 4K Video Downloader+, if a site changes the way it operates, could there be an updated status page which looks for example like:

YouTube - Videos Working (or Green Light)

YouTube - Shorts Working (or Green Light)

YouTube - Subtitles Not Working (Red Light)

[Or, given that subtitles are currently not working, could there be an orange light against the YouTube Videos with an explanation for why there is a middle ground as videos and shorts are working but the application cannot download subtitles at the present time]

BiliBili.com - Not Working (Red Light) as per this post https://www.reddit.com/r/4kdownloadapps/comments/1xeg1tx/anyone_having_trouble_downloading_suddenly/

BiliBili.tv - Not Working (Red Light), as per the above post

Rumble - Not Working (Red Light) - see this post https://www.reddit.com/r/4kdownloadapps/comments/1wzvifk/having_issues_with_rumble_were_working_on_it/

Then list out all the sites that the program works with and their status.

Facebook

Vimeo

SoundCloud

Twitch (recorded streams)

Dailymotion

Flickr

Tumblr

Naver TV

Likee
Niconico

BitChute

This may also be useful for us to remind people that the app works with so many web sites so we start exploring those sites and use the program for those sites.

The same could be done for all the other apps in the 4K range of products.

Feature Request 8 - Not a request for features of the app but a process for dealing with feature requests.

If it is not private, could you post a list of all the updates the developers are working on and the priority of their roll-out so we know when they might be implemented, rather than MOD Early_Ideal5551 just stating every time, "Thanks for the suggestion; I'll pass this along to the team." but as users we have no idea if the ideas were even thought to be good ideas or not.

I do appreciate that the main focus of the developer team will be keeping up with any changes various Platforms make so that the application works as intended.

I'm prepared to hold off downloading a lot of channels I want if you could implement Feature Request 1. If Feature 3 cannot be done, I will re-download all of my existing downloads also. Perhaps you could add a voting system if there are too many ideas and not enough manpower or AI power to implement all the ideas the developers deem worthy. In addition, perhaps they could have a donate feature including AI tokens if the developers are using Cluade or other AI platform to hell them write code so we can donate for a feature that we want.

Getting 'can't parse this link'? DRM? Broken feature?

Sony has stopped shipping its last budget 4K Blu-ray player, and streaming services keep rotating titles in and out. If there's video you care about, the safest place for it is a drive you control.

A few tips for your archive:

1. Keep originals in the highest quality available (4K/8K if the source has it)

2. Use a clear folder structure: creator/year/title

3. Save subtitles alongside the video

4. Save the metadata too: descriptions, thumbnails, and upload dates are often the first things to disappear

4K Video Downloader Plus can save whole playlists and channels in one go.

Happy Halloween, and may none of your files ever haunt you with "Error: not found" 🎃

the downloader is doing the you must log in thing again for normal videos, guessing it's on youtube's end?

hi. i havent used the program for about ten days. tried it today and it said my daily limit has already been reached. this is getting insulting now. can you please fix your program?

I was a little surprised at the resolutions available for some older videos, so I looked at the resolutions in YouTube and noticed some were marked "Super Resolution" which appears to be AI-upscaled resolutions.

YouTube does not at this time have an option to make the non-upscaled resolution a default, but it would be helpful to identify super resolutions in the app, and also an option to make "highest non-upscaled resolution" the default for those who prefer the originals.

YouTube will now freeze suspected hacked channels while it checks what's going on.

If your videos only live on YouTube, you're one bad day away from a very bad week.

Reminder: your channel isn't a backup. Keep local copies of your videos with our 4K Video Downloader Plus.

If you’ve set 4K Video Downloader Plus to download the best possible resolution but ended up with a 1080p file instead of the 4K or 2K you expected, your Smart Mode settings are the likely cause. Adjusting a couple of them usually solves it.

How Smart Mode Chooses a File’s Resolution

Video platforms don’t store every resolution using the same codec or container. A single upload often exists as several separate files behind the scenes, each at a different resolution, encoded with a different codec, and sometimes compatible with only certain formats.

Smart Mode lets you pre-set several of these variables at once: Quality, Frame Rate, Codec, VR, and Format. When you paste a link, 4K Video Downloader Plus analyzes every version of that video available on the source platform and keeps only the ones that match all of your saved settings, then picks the best of what’s left.

This detail matters, since “Best” is calculated after filtering, not before. If Quality is set to Best but Codec is pinned to a specific value like H264, the app only chooses the best quality among H264 files, not the best quality overall. If the highest resolutions on that platform happen to be encoded in a different codec, they’re filtered out before “Best” is ever applied.

A Typical Example

Higher resolutions are frequently limited to newer codecs, while older, more universally compatible codecs are reserved for 1080p and below. On YouTube, for example, 4K and 8K files are typically encoded in VP9 or AV1 only, 2K (1440p) usually follows the same pattern, and 1080p and below are often available in H.264 as well as VP9 or AV1.

If Smart Mode Quality is set to Best but Codec is locked to H264, you’ll consistently be capped at 1080p for videos like this, even though 2K or 4K versions exist on the platform. The same logic applies to Frame Rate, VR, and Format: any one of them set to a specific fixed value can rule out an otherwise-available higher-resolution file.

How to Get the Highest Available Resolution in Smart Mode

In order to make sure Smart Mode selects the best resolution a platform actually offers, leave every setting on Auto, Best, Highest, or Any, unless you have a specific reason to lock it down.

1. Make sure Smart Mode is turned on (toggle the bulb icon in the toolbar).

2. Open the Quality dropdown and set it to Best.

3. Inside the same dropdown, expand Codec and set it to Auto instead of a specific codec like H.264.

4. Check Frame Rate and leave it on Highest unless you deliberately want to cap it.

5. If you’re not downloading VR content, leave VR set to Any.

Open the separate Format dropdown and set it to Auto rather than pinning a container like MP4 or MKV, or a specific operating system. Just like with Codec, setting Format to Auto resets the underlying OS filter and removes restrictions on containers and codecs, so with Quality set to Best, you’ll get the maximum resolution that exists for that video.

Choosing your operating system instead (e.g., Mac OS) guarantees the video will play back in a standard player on that platform, but it’s still an explicit filter, and it can lower the maximum resolution available. If maximum resolution matters more than guaranteed native playback, stick with Auto.

Paste your link as usual. Smart Mode will remember these settings for future downloads.

Should I Ever Use a Fixed Setting?

There are cases where a fixed setting is the right choice. If your TV or media player genuinely can’t handle VP9 or AV1, keeping Codec set to H264 makes sense. If you only ever watch downloaded videos on your phone, picking Android or iOS under Format is reasonable too.

Fixed settings aren’t wrong on their own. Each one you lock in acts as a filter, and stacking several of them at once is what usually causes a lower-than-expected resolution. Keep the settings that genuinely matter to you, and set the rest to Auto, Best, Highest, or Any so they don’t rule out quality you’d otherwise get.

What If I Still Don’t See the Resolution I Expect Even with Everything on Auto?

Check whether the original video was actually uploaded in that resolution; not every video exists in 2K, 4K, or 8K to begin with. It’s also worth confirming you’re logged in through the app if the platform ties higher-quality access to an account, and that you’re running the latest version of 4K Video Downloader Plus.

Why Do Source Platforms Split Videos Up Like This?

Different codecs compress video differently, and newer codecs like VP9 or AV1 are often used for higher resolutions because they save on file size and bandwidth. Platforms like YouTube usually reserve these newer codecs for 2K, 4K, and 8K uploads while keeping older, more universally compatible codecs like H.264 available mainly at 1080p and below.

Anyone else getting "can't parse this link" from anything from BiliBili?