Frequently asked questions

MediaDocks is a browser-based media utility with two halves. The first reads a public link from YouTube, Instagram, X, Pinterest or Facebook and offers the video, audio or image that link publishes. The second works on files you already have: it transcribes speech to text, generates timed subtitles, and summarises long recordings. Everything runs server-side and streams back to you — there is nothing to install.

No. There is no sign-up, no email capture and no password. The tools are reachable directly from the page you land on. Because there are no accounts, there is also no profile, no history and no saved library — each request stands on its own.

It is free to use and there is no paid tier, no trial clock and no feature held back behind a wall. The practical ceiling is a light rate limit — ten link resolves and five downloads per minute — which exists to keep the service responsive rather than to upsell you.

Any current browser on any operating system: Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge on desktop, plus mobile Safari and Chrome on iOS and Android. JavaScript needs to be enabled. There is no desktop app, no browser extension and no mobile app, and we do not publish one — if you find something claiming to be a MediaDocks app, it is not ours.

No. Those run on the server as part of the extraction pipeline. You only ever interact with a web page.

Use the contact page. Bug reports are most useful when they include the kind of link you used (you do not need to send the link itself), the format you picked, and the exact message you saw.

Resolve the link as usual, then switch the format selection from video to audio. You will be offered the original audio track as M4A plus MP3 at 128, 192 or 320 kbps. Choosing audio skips the video streams entirely, so it finishes considerably faster than any video rung.

Pick M4A when you just want the sound and your player supports it — it is the original track, copied without a second round of compression, so it is both smaller and cleaner than any MP3 you could make from it. Pick MP3 when you need maximum compatibility with older hardware, car stereos, DJ software or devices that refuse AAC.

Usually not, and sometimes it is actively meaningless. MP3 rungs are capped at the source bitrate: if the platform only published a 128 kbps AAC track, asking for 320 kbps MP3 cannot invent detail that was discarded before we ever saw the file. It just produces a bigger file. For speech and podcasts, 128 kbps is genuinely sufficient; for music you care about, 192 is a sensible default.

Yes, slightly, and unavoidably. The source track is already lossy, so encoding it to MP3 is a second lossy pass — generational loss. It is rarely audible at 192 kbps or above on normal listening equipment, but if you want to avoid it entirely, take the original M4A instead.

The title and creator name are carried through as tags where the source publishes them. Treat embedded artwork as best-effort rather than guaranteed, since not every platform exposes a usable cover image alongside the audio stream.

No media is kept. A download is assembled in a request-scoped temporary location, streamed to your browser and deleted. Uploaded audio is processed and discarded the same way. There is no media library, no archive and no cache of finished files to browse or leak.

The URL itself is not recorded. Usage measurement stores only which platform a request belonged to — enough to know that, say, Pinterest is heavily used, and not enough to reconstruct what anyone looked at.

Not in the analytics record. Visitors are counted using a salted digest that rotates daily, which means the same person on two different days cannot be linked, and the value cannot be reversed back into an address. An IP is necessarily visible to the server while a request is in flight, as it is for any website, but it is not written into the usage data.

Thirty minutes. After that the descriptor expires and you will be asked to paste the URL again. The short window is why nothing has to persist on disk.

No tracking or advertising cookies are set by us, and nothing is sold or shared with data brokers. If you have not visited the admin area, the site does not set a session cookie at all.

Two necessary parties. The source platform sees a request for public content, as it would for any visitor. For AI features, the transcription provider receives your audio to process it. No one else is in the path, and the privacy page names both.

It depends entirely on the content, your jurisdiction and your purpose, and nothing here is legal advice. Saving your own uploads, material published under a permissive licence such as Creative Commons, public-domain works, or content whose rightsholder has given you permission is generally fine. Copying someone else's copyrighted video to republish, redistribute or monetise is generally not, regardless of the tool used. Many platforms, YouTube among them, also prohibit downloading in their own terms of service, which is a contractual matter between you and that platform. If you are unsure about a specific file, assume it is restricted and get permission.

It does not sign in, present credentials, replay cookies or use session tokens, so private and follower-only content stays out of reach. It does not bypass age gates, paywalls, CAPTCHA or DRM. It does not decrypt protected streams from subscription services. It reads only what an ordinary signed-out visitor could already load, and when that is nothing, it says so instead of working around the restriction.

You are. MediaDocks is a general-purpose utility, like a browser or a file manager, and it has no way to know whether you hold rights to a given item. Deciding whether you may save, keep or reuse something is your call and your liability. The terms of service set this out directly.

Use the copyright and DMCA page. Because no media is ever stored on our servers, there is no hosted copy for us to take down — but we do act on reports by blocking specific sources where that is the appropriate remedy, and the page explains the process and what to include in a notice.

Only if you hold the rights or the licence permits it. The file arriving on your device grants you no rights you did not already have. Commercial reuse of third-party media without clearance is the single most common way people get themselves into trouble, and it is worth checking the licence before you build anything around a clip.

Because the alternative is wasting your time. A tool that implies it can reach private posts, then fails silently or hands you a cover image labelled as a video, is worse than one that is specific about its scope up front. Each platform page lists what works and what does not for that platform, checked against live public links rather than guessed.