Download part of a YouTube video just the section you need

Why download a section instead of the whole video

A two-hour lecture at 1080p can run to gigabytes when you only need four minutes of it. Taking just the section saves storage and skips a trip through an editing app afterwards. It suits quoting a talk, keeping one highlight from a match, or pulling a segment for a lesson or presentation you have the right to use.

Setting the start and end

The Trim tab gives you a timeline of the whole video with a start and an end handle:

• Drag either handle, or tap the timeline to move the nearest one.
• Use − and + beside Start and End to nudge by five seconds.
• Or take a preset: the first 30 or 60 seconds, the middle third, the last 30 seconds — or, on YouTube, the most-replayed 30 seconds.

The estimated size updates as you go: it's the full video's size scaled to the length you've chosen.

Finding the moment with the most-replayed graph

Where YouTube publishes it, the bars above the timeline show how often each part of the video gets replayed — the same “most replayed” curve YouTube draws over its own progress bar. The tallest bars are usually the moment people came for, and the Most replayed 30s preset jumps straight to it.

It measures rewatching, not loudness or action, and not every video has it: newer and less-watched videos often don't.

Cut without re-encoding

The section is copied straight out of the quality you chose, not re-compressed, so it's exactly as sharp as the full download would be. The one side effect: a copied video can only start on a keyframe, so the file may open a second or two before your start time. Everything you selected is always inside it.

Choose an audio option instead and you get just the soundtrack of that range — handy for a quote from an interview or a passage of a lecture.

Limits

Trimming works on one video at a time:

• Playlists can't be trimmed — open the single video you want from the playlist downloader or YouTube itself.
• A section has to be at least a second long and sit inside the video.
• Streams that are still live have no fixed length yet, so they can't be trimmed until they've finished.
• The clip is deleted from storage about an hour after it's ready.

Trimming isn't only for YouTube: any single video with a known length can be trimmed from its platform's page, such as Facebook or Dailymotion. The most-replayed graph is YouTube's alone.

Excerpts of other people's videos

Short excerpts used for commentary, criticism or teaching are treated more leniently than whole copies in many countries, but the rules vary and platform terms still apply. What you may legally keep covers the basics. For the whole video, use the YouTube video downloader.