How it works
What happens between pasting a link and saving a file. The two sources take different routes, and only one of them sends the video through this server.
Four steps, and then the part worth knowing.
- You paste a link. It is held in memory for the length of the request and is never written to disk.
- This server reads the page once. One ordinary request, the kind a browser makes. It comes back with the title, the running time and the list of qualities.
- You choose a quality. Only then does anything ask the source for a download address — see below for why the order matters.
- The file reaches you, by one of two routes that are genuinely different.
Why the address is fetched last, not first
It would be tidier to fetch both download addresses up front and print the file sizes next to each quality. That was tried and it does not work: XFreeHD keeps only one working address per video alive at a time. Creating the second one kills the first, permanently — a dead address never recovers, no matter how long you wait or how many times you retry it.
So a page that showed you both sizes would be a page where one of the two buttons was already broken before you touched it. Fetching at the moment you choose is the only arrangement where the link you press is the live one. The cost is the empty size column, which is a fair trade for a download that works.
Even then the source refuses an address it just issued now and then, at random. When that happens this tool asks for a fresh one rather than handing you a broken link.
The two routes
xfree — the file addresses carry no signature and no lock, and the file servers allow cross-site requests. Your browser fetches the video itself, directly. No video byte touches this server, and your download runs at whatever speed your connection supports.
XFreeHD — the file addresses are locked to whoever requested them, and the file servers refuse cross-site requests. Your browser is therefore unable to fetch the file. This server fetches it and streams it to you as it arrives; nothing is stored on the way through.
That difference is not a preference. It is a property of the two sites, and it is the reason one source may feel faster than the other.
What is not stored
No account exists to store anything against. Videos are not cached, copied or kept. Titles and quality labels — never download addresses — are held briefly in memory so that pasting the same link twice does not read the same page twice.
How to download an xfree or XFreeHD video, in one line
Copy the link, paste it at the top of the downloader, press Fetch, press Save. Everything above is what happens in between — you do not need any of it to use the tool.