Why Reddit Videos Have No Sound After Downloading
This is the core issue and most guides skip over explaining it properly. Reddit hosts its own videos through a system called v.redd.it. When a user uploads a video, Reddit stores it as two separate files: one for the video stream and one for the audio stream. These get served together in the browser or app through adaptive streaming, the same technology YouTube uses. The player combines them on the fly and you hear sound.
Most simple download tools, the ones that just grab a URL and download whatever's at that link, only capture the video stream. They find the video file URL, download it, and hand it to you. The audio URL is stored separately and requires a slightly different process to grab. You end up with a video that plays perfectly but has no audio track at all.
This isn't a bug in the tools, exactly. It's a consequence of how Reddit structures its media delivery. The same thing used to happen with Facebook videos until most download tools caught up. Reddit's been doing adaptive streaming for years now and a lot of general-purpose download tools still haven't fully adapted.
Tools That Actually Download Both Streams
MyVideoCity handles this correctly. Paste a Reddit URL and it fetches both the video and audio streams, merges them, and gives you a single file with sound intact. That's the whole point of using a dedicated tool rather than a random link-grabber.
If you prefer command-line tools, yt-dlp handles Reddit video correctly. The syntax is the same as for any other platform - you pass the URL and it does the work. yt-dlp actively merges the streams before delivering the file. FFmpeg handles the merge in the background. It's the most reliable option if you're downloading Reddit videos in any volume, but it requires you to be comfortable installing and running command-line software. Not for everyone.
redditsave.com (now called rapidsave.com) is a dedicated web tool that handles the stream merging. You replace "reddit" in any URL with "redditsave" and it downloads the merged file. It works reasonably well for casual use, though I've seen it struggle occasionally with longer videos or posts that have since been edited.
Different Types of Reddit Video - They're Not All the Same
Not every video on Reddit is hosted on v.redd.it. Quite a few aren't. Reddit posts can link to YouTube, Imgur, Gfycat (now mostly dead), Streamable, Twitch clips, and a dozen other platforms. What you see in your Reddit feed and what's actually hosting the video are two different things. This matters for downloading.
If a post links to a YouTube video, you're downloading a YouTube video. The Reddit wrapper is irrelevant. The same applies to Twitch clips, Streamable videos, and similar embeds. A Reddit video download tool that handles v.redd.it may not handle these embedded sources. You'd need to go to the original source or use a tool that handles multiple platforms, which is exactly what MyVideoCity is built for.
GIFs on Reddit are a separate case. Reddit converts uploaded GIFs to mp4 files automatically because video files are smaller and load faster than animated GIFs. These converted files typically don't have an audio track to begin with - they're just looping video without sound. If you download a Reddit "GIF" and get a silent file, that's normal. The original content had no audio. The silent download is technically correct.
How to Download Reddit Videos on iPhone
iPhone is where this gets annoying. Safari doesn't let you save video files directly to your camera roll from a web page without some workaround. The press-and-hold trick that sometimes works on regular videos often doesn't work for Reddit's streaming format.
The cleanest approach on iOS: use MyVideoCity from Safari. Paste the Reddit URL, let it process, then tap and hold on the download button. You'll get an option to "Download Linked File" which saves to your Files app. From there you can move it to Photos if you want it in your camera roll. It's two steps, but it works reliably across iOS versions.
If you have the Reddit app, the built-in share menu sometimes gives you a save option for certain videos - but this only works for v.redd.it content and the audio issue applies here too. The native save function in the Reddit app notoriously strips audio from downloads. It's been reported as a bug many times. As of early 2026, it's still not reliably fixed. Don't trust the in-app save for anything where audio matters.
Downloading on Android
Android is more straightforward. Most Android browsers let you long-press a video to save it, or you can download to your device through a file manager. But the same audio-stripping problem exists if you're just grabbing the video URL directly. The browser's native download might give you a silent file for the same reason - it's only getting the video stream URL.
Using MyVideoCity through Chrome on Android works well. Paste the URL, process it, tap download, and the file saves to your downloads folder complete with audio. If you have a file manager installed, you can access it there immediately. Most Android video players will find it automatically within a few minutes through media scanning.
Why Some Reddit Videos Won't Download at All
Not every video on Reddit is publicly available for download. Private subreddit content requires authentication. Some posts have been deleted but are still cached in the interface - clicking download on these will fail because the source file is already gone from Reddit's servers. Posts from very new accounts sometimes get quarantined by Reddit's spam filters in a way that affects media delivery.
Crossposted content is another tricky case. If a post is a crosspost from another subreddit and you try to download from the crosspost rather than the original, you'll sometimes get errors. The media is hosted under the original post's URL, and Reddit's redirect doesn't always work cleanly for third-party download tools. Go to the original post and download from there.
NSFW subreddit content requires being logged into Reddit to access. Download tools that don't authenticate with Reddit's API can't reach this content at all, because the CDN checks for a valid session before serving the file. If you're trying to download something and getting consistent errors on a specific post, checking whether it's from an NSFW subreddit is worth doing.
What File Format You'll Get
Reddit videos come out as MP4 files with H.264 video and AAC audio when properly merged. This plays on everything - every phone, every operating system, every media player made in the last decade. You shouldn't need to convert it. The resolution depends on what the original uploader posted and what Reddit's compression did to it. Reddit compresses uploads significantly, so what you download won't match the creator's original source quality. It's the best version Reddit kept, not the best version that ever existed.
For more on video formats and what the quality labels actually mean, see our video formats guide. And if you're saving videos from other platforms alongside Reddit, MyVideoCity handles TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Vimeo in the same workflow.