Reddit video downloader: get the audio too, plus GIFs and whole subreddits

Two things to know before you start

1. Reddit video and audio are separate files

This is the one thing that trips people up. Reddit serves video through its own player, and the video track and the audio track are two different files. Right-click the player, save the video, and you get a silent clip - which is why so many people conclude that Reddit downloads are broken.

A real downloader fetches both and muxes them. All four tools below do. If you ever end up with a silent file, that is the symptom, and the fix is to use a tool that muxes rather than to hunt for a different link.

2. Half the "videos" on Reddit are not hosted by Reddit

A huge share of Reddit posts are links out to YouTube, Streamable, Imgur, Gfycat or a direct file somewhere. Only v.redd.it posts are native. Crossposts make this worse: the post you are looking at may just be a pointer to another post.

Practically this is good news, because if a Reddit grab fails you can usually open the source and download from there instead. It also means tool coverage on Reddit looks better than it is - a tool may be "handling Reddit" by quietly handing the URL to its YouTube extractor.

One more thing: NSFW and quarantined subs need a session

Age-gated, quarantined and private subreddits are invisible to a tool that has no cookies, and the error you get back is usually a generic 404 rather than anything about permissions. If a post loads for you in the browser but not for the tool, that mismatch is the first thing to check.