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Downloading Movies from Dropbox

Posted on 2009-06-15 by Mark Boszko
This post was published more than a few years ago (on 2009-06-15) and may contain inaccurate technical information, outmoded thoughts, or cringe takes. Proceed at your own risk.

When you upload a QuickTime or other movie file to Dropbox, and then get the “public link” to give to someone else, Dropbox does a really cool thing and redirects the original movie file link to deliver a very simple web page with the movie embedded in it instead. Which looks great in a browser if you just need to view a quick clip — but what if you actually intended for the link to be a download instead?

It turns out the trick is a little obscure, but fairly simple. All you need to do is add ?&dl=1 to the end of the “public link” URL. So:

http://files.getdropbox.com/.../movie.mov

becomes instead:

http://files.getdropbox.com/.../movie.mov?dl=1

Once you do that, Dropbox forces the download link, and the movie will download instead of playing in your browser.

4 thoughts on “Downloading Movies from Dropbox”

  1. barry says:
    2009-07-19 at 1:25 pm

    thanks for this but my link looks like this https://dl-web.getdropbox.com/get/sharedfoldername/moviename.mov?w=901fd66f

    I think the difference is that you are talking about public links and I have a shared folder. I have tried fixing the first part of the link and the last part like you have shown but I get to a page that says I don’t belong there. Any ideas, short of getting the original sender to send a public link, or reup in a zip file?

    thanks

  2. Mark says:
    2009-07-23 at 9:25 pm

    I was talking about public links, yes.

    If you have a shared folder, I would think it should show up in your Dropbox, and you could just access it at a file level with the Dropbox app for your operating system. That’s how it works for me anyway. (Please note, I am not Dropbox Tech Support.)

  3. Thelma says:
    2012-08-20 at 11:35 am

    This little trick was a big help to me. Thanks!

  4. KateOnline says:
    2013-04-12 at 5:04 pm

    THANK YOU! This was driving me crazy today.

Comments are closed.

Mark Boszko

Film & Video Editor, Voiceover Artist, macOS IT Engineer, and Maker

© 2025 Mark Boszko | find Mark elsewhere on the internet