Which quality should you download? Real file sizes, measured
The quality list is not a menu of "better" and "worse". It is a list of prices, and the price is data.
One video, six sizes
These are the real figures for a single twelve-minute video, read from the files themselves rather than estimated:
| Quality | Size | Share of the largest |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p | 353 MB | 100% |
| 720p | 182 MB | 52% |
| 480p | 77 MB | 22% |
| 360p | 59 MB | 17% |
| 240p | 37 MB | 10% |
| 144p | 18 MB | 5% |
The tool draws that bar for you before you commit, because a list of numbers is harder to compare at a glance than a set of lengths. The largest file is the longest bar. That is all the bar means.
Choosing without thinking about it
On a phone, 480p is almost always right. A phone screen is physically too small for the difference between 480p and 1080p to survive, and 480p costs you a fifth of the data. On mobile data that is the difference between one video and five.
On a laptop or a TV, take 720p or 1080p if it exists. This is where the extra megabytes actually turn into something you can see.
144p and 240p are for keeping, not watching. They exist for archiving something you want a copy of rather than a good copy of.
Not every video has every quality
The list always shows six rows, and on most videos some of them are dark. That is not a bug and it is not the tool failing to find them — the video was never published in that quality. Anything uploaded before roughly 2015 often stops at 360p, and plenty of older material never went above 240p.
Showing the missing ones rather than hiding them is deliberate. A list that silently drops what does not exist leaves you wondering whether you missed a better option; a dark row with a label answers the question.
A note on length
Size scales with length as well as quality, so these figures are for twelve minutes. A three-hour video at 480p came out at 1.19 GB in the same run — larger than the twelve-minute file at 1080p. Check the size on the row, not the quality label, when the video is long.
Sizes are read live on the TNAFlix downloader and on the EMPFlix and MovieFap pages, so the numbers you see are that video's, not this example's. If the wait matters more than the size, why downloads are slow explains what sets the rate.