3 min read · updated
Why Reddit videos download without sound
Reddit stores the picture and the sound of a video as two entirely separate files. Most downloaders fetch only the video file, which is why you get a perfectly good clip with total silence.
This is the single most common complaint about Reddit downloads, and it is not a bug in the tool you used — it is a consequence of how Reddit's video host works.
When you upload a video to Reddit it is processed into a DASH stream. In that format, the visual track and the audio track live at completely separate URLs. A player fetches both and plays them in sync. A downloader that only grabs the obvious video URL gets exactly half of the post.
What the two files look like
For a v.redd.it post, the video lives at a URL ending in something like DASH_720.mp4 and the audio at one ending in DASH_audio.mp4. They are siblings under the same post ID.
Older posts sometimes have no audio file at all, because the original upload was silent. In that case no tool can add sound — there was never any to begin with.
How to get a Reddit video with its audio
- Use a downloader that explicitly fetches both tracks and muxes them into one MP4. Ours does this by default — there is no separate 'with audio' option because a silent file is not a useful result.
- If you already have two separate files, ffmpeg can join them: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.mp4 -c copy output.mp4
- Check whether the post ever had sound. If the original poster uploaded a silent clip, silence is the correct output.
Why some tools never fixed this
Merging two streams requires running ffmpeg on a server, which costs CPU and bandwidth that a simple link-scraper does not. Many downloaders skip it and hand you the video URL directly, because it is free for them and the failure is not obvious until you play the file.