Dailymotion is the largest video platform in France, a top-five video platform across continental Europe, and home to a meaningful share of European news, sports, and entertainment content that does not appear on YouTube. For many users in North America it is the platform where they find content that has been removed from YouTube for copyright reasons — older TV broadcasts, music videos pulled from the major labels' YouTube channels, and full-episode uploads of European TV shows. This guide explains how TubePull's Dailymotion downloader works, what HD really means on Dailymotion, and the practical workflow for saving videos.
Quick start: Open TubePull, paste any Dailymotion video URL (dailymotion.com/video/x1a2b3c), pick MP4 at the highest available resolution, and download. The walkthrough below covers what does and doesn't work, geo-restrictions, and Dailymotion's HD ladder.
Why Dailymotion still matters
Dailymotion's market position has shifted over the years, but it remains relevant for several reasons:
- Europe-first content: French, German, and Italian broadcasters often post content to Dailymotion before — or instead of — YouTube. Eurovision clips, regional news segments, and football match highlights frequently appear on Dailymotion first.
- Content removed from YouTube: When a video gets a copyright takedown on YouTube, mirrors often surface on Dailymotion. Whether that is good or bad is contextual, but it's a fact of the modern internet.
- Longer-form content: Dailymotion's per-video limits have historically been more permissive than YouTube's for non-monetized uploaders, leading to long-form lectures, full-length documentaries, and event archives.
- Less aggressive ad-loading: Dailymotion's pre-roll and mid-roll ad model is less aggressive than YouTube's, which is part of why some viewers prefer it.
Dailymotion's video quality tiers
Dailymotion's playback ladder is similar to YouTube but with different tier names:
- 240p / 380p (Low) — legacy SD quality, present on most older videos
- 480p (Standard) — default mobile quality
- 720p (HD) — most modern uploads
- 1080p (Full HD) — supported for monetized creators and partner-account uploads
- 1440p / 2160p (4K) — supported on premium uploads, less common than on YouTube
What the uploader's account tier allows determines what Dailymotion stores at the high end. Free accounts cap at 720p. Partner accounts can upload up to 4K. The variant TubePull returns matches the highest tier Dailymotion stored for the video.
For a comparison of how video quality download works across platforms, see the best YouTube quality settings guide — the encoding considerations are similar.
URL formats that work
Dailymotion's URL space is consistent:
- Standard video pages:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1a2b3c - Embedded player URLs:
https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x1a2b3c— TubePull extracts the underlying video ID - Mobile URLs:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1a2b3c?playlist=xxxx— query string is stripped - Channel video pages:
https://www.dailymotion.com/channel-name/video/x1a2b3c - Old short format:
https://dai.ly/x1a2b3c— these redirect to the canonical URL and are followed automatically
Geo-restrictions
Dailymotion has more aggressive geo-restrictions than YouTube. European broadcasters frequently restrict content to the EU, French content to France only, and so on. The mechanism is server-side IP filtering at Dailymotion's CDN.
TubePull's workers are located in US datacenters. If a video is region-locked to Europe, our worker IPs see the same restriction. The video will return a video unavailable in your region error. There is no workaround through TubePull's web interface — for geo-restricted content, your options are:
- Use a VPN to position yourself in the appropriate region, then use the yt-dlp command-line tool locally from your VPN-connected machine
- Find an unrestricted mirror of the same content
- Contact the broadcaster to ask for a non-restricted version
The first option is by far the most common workflow for users who need to access geo-restricted European content from outside Europe.
What does not work
- Region-locked videos (see above)
- Removed or deleted videos: when a video is taken down, the source file is removed from Dailymotion's CDN
- Live streams in progress: like all platforms, live streams are not a finite file until they end and Dailymotion archives them
- Private videos: Dailymotion supports private uploads visible only to the uploader's followers; these require authentication
- DRM-protected partner content: a small subset of major-studio content is delivered with DRM and cannot be downloaded through any compliant tool
Audio-only Dailymotion download
If you only want the audio from a Dailymotion video — a music video where the official audio source is hard to find, a lecture, an interview — paste the URL and pick MP3. Dailymotion video audio is typically AAC; TubePull extracts and re-encodes to MP3.
Comparing TubePull to dedicated Dailymotion downloaders
There are a handful of dedicated Dailymotion downloaders, mostly ad-heavy web tools. Practical differences for TubePull:
- Multi-platform. Same paste field handles YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and others.
- No ad-gates. Downloads start immediately.
- History page. Pro accounts have download history.
- Built on yt-dlp. Dailymotion's extractor is well-maintained; when Dailymotion changes its API, yt-dlp typically ships a fix within days.
For French and European users who primarily download from Dailymotion, a dedicated tool may feel more familiar. For users who pull from multiple platforms, TubePull's unified workflow is simpler.
Use cases worth mentioning
Three categories of Dailymotion download that are particularly common:
- News archival. Journalists and researchers preserving European news broadcasts that are not on YouTube. See the journalism archive workflow for the framework.
- Educational content. Long-form lectures and conference talks. Particularly common in French academic content.
- TV episode and broadcast archival. Some users save older TV broadcasts uploaded to Dailymotion that have no other accessible source.
Each of these has different legal considerations. Personal archival of public broadcasts is generally fair use in most jurisdictions; redistribution requires the rights holder's permission. For a fuller treatment, see Is it legal to download YouTube videos — Dailymotion's Terms of Use follow similar principles.
Ready to download from Dailymotion
Open the Dailymotion downloader, paste any public video URL, and pick MP4 at the highest resolution offered. For multi-platform downloading — YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok — the same paste field covers all of them.