4K Video Downloader 26.3.1 for Mac

Copy a video link, paste it into the app, and a minute later the file is sitting in your Downloads folder in whatever quality the site had.

That is the whole pitch of 4K Video Downloader Plus, and after twelve years and 60-odd million users it still does that one job better than most.

Version 26.3.1 shipped on 17 August 2026 with separate builds for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

What It Actually Does

You paste a URL and pick a quality. The app grabs the video stream, the audio stream and, if you want them, the subtitles, then muxes the lot into a single MP4 or MKV file.

Resolutions run from 360p up to 8K where the source has it. Audio can be pulled out on its own as MP3, M4A or OGG, which is the fastest way to turn a lecture or a DJ set into something your phone will play offline.

Supported sites include YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitch, Bilibili and Dailymotion. Playlists and entire channels download in one go, and subtitles come out as SRT files in over 50 languages.

There is a built-in browser too, so you can log in to a site inside the app and reach content that needs an account.

The Free Version, and Where It Stops

The Starter tier is free forever and needs no card. It downloads video and audio at full quality, including 4K.

What it caps is volume: there is a daily limit on how many items you can queue, and the vendor does not publish the exact number in its documentation. Private and login-protected downloads, bulk subtitle extraction and the AI audio tools are paid features.

Paid licences at the time of writing are Lite at 15 dollars a year, Personal at 25 dollars once, and Pro at 45 dollars once with a commercial-use permit. There is a 7-day trial that unlocks everything, so you can find out whether the cap bothers you before paying anything.

Apple Silicon or Intel: Get the Right File

The vendor ships two separate Mac installers and they are not interchangeable.

Macs from late 2020 onward (M1, M2, M3, M4 and later) want the Apple Silicon build, which is a 259 MB .dmg. Older Intel Macs want the Intel build at 264.6 MB.

If you are not sure which you have, click the Apple menu, choose About This Mac, and read the Chip or Processor line. Anything starting with "Apple M" is Apple Silicon.

Either way you need macOS 12 Monterey or newer. Macs stuck on Big Sur or older cannot run 26.2.1 at all.

The Old 4K Video Downloader 4.33.5 Still Exists

The classic app, before the "Plus" rename, is frozen at 4.33.5 from January 2025. It is a smaller 118 MB download and it still works on macOS 12 and up.

It gets no further updates, though, which matters more than usual for a downloader. Streaming sites change how they serve video every few months, and a frozen extractor eventually stops resolving links. Treat 4.33.5 as a fallback, not a choice.

The Windows and Linux builds of 4K Video Downloader carry both branches side by side if you need the classic version on another machine, and there is a separate 4K Video Downloader for Android APK for saving to a phone.

What Plays the Files Afterwards

MP4 files open in QuickTime without a fuss. MKV files do not, and that trips up a lot of people who picked MKV because the app recommends it for long high-quality videos.

Any of these will play MKV on a Mac straight away.

• IINA for Mac - the most macOS-native of the bunch, built on mpv with a proper Apple Silicon build.
• VLC Media Player for Mac - plays everything, looks like nothing.
• mpv player for Mac - keyboard-driven and very light.
• Elmedia Player for Mac - adds AirPlay and Chromecast streaming.

If you want to remux an MKV into MP4 without re-encoding, MKVToolNix for Mac does it in seconds and keeps the subtitle tracks. For an actual format conversion, ffWorks is a well-built FFmpeg front end that saves you from writing command lines.

Free Mac Tools That Overlap

Nothing here replaces a downloader outright, but a few cover adjacent jobs at no cost.

Our own Stream Extractor pulls the direct media URL out of a streaming page in your browser, with nothing to install. The YouTube Playlist to M3U tool turns a playlist into a file your player can open directly, which is often what people wanted instead of 200 downloaded videos.

For audio-only work, the Online Audio Converter handles one-off format changes in the browser with nothing to install.

For anything more involved, Audacity for Mac paired with the LAME encoder covers editing and MP3 export properly.

If the real goal is recording rather than downloading, OBS Studio for Mac captures anything on screen, including streams that no downloader can touch.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell is what you plan to do with the file after it lands.

If you are downloading in order to cut, caption or grade the footage, a downloader is the wrong first tool and you will end up re-encoding twice. Go straight to Shotcut for Mac or CapCut for Mac if you want free.

Final Cut Pro is the paid option if you are already in Apple's ecosystem and want the timeline to match the rest of your workflow.

If your source is a disc rather than a URL, this app cannot help at all. MakeMKV for Mac rips DVD and Blu-ray to MKV losslessly, and Mac DVDRipper Pro handles the messier discs.

And if you download dozens of videos a week, the free tier will frustrate you within days. Either budget for the 25-dollar lifetime licence or accept that you are the customer this pricing model was built for.

Quick questions

Download 4K Video Downloader Plus 26.3.1 for Mac and see how far the free tier gets you, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.