Is 8K Worth Downloading? What Your Screen Can Actually Show
Many YouTube videos now offer 8K in the quality menu, and if you're downloading a video to keep, picking the biggest number feels like the obvious choice. For most people, though, 8K brings no visible improvement at all. It does bring files twice the size of 4K, and on many computers, a video that won't play.
TL;DR: For most people, 8K isn't worth downloading. On a 65-inch TV, you'd have to sit closer than about 1.3 meters (4 feet) to see any gain over 4K. In a blind test run by Warner Bros. and several partners, most viewers couldn't tell 8K from 4K at all. An 8K file is about twice the size of 4K and ten times the size of 1080p. YouTube also offers it only in AV1, a format many Macs and older TVs can't play. Pick 4K if you have a 4K TV, and 1080p for everything else.
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The Short Answer
Match the download to the screen you'll watch it on:
- Phone, tablet or laptop: 1080p. These screens are too small for you to see more detail from a normal distance.
- 4K TV or a large monitor: 4K, if you sit fairly close. From across a living room, 1080p often looks the same.
- 8K TV that you sit very close to: that's the one case where 8K can make a small difference.
Can You Actually See the Difference?
In early 2020, Warner Bros. ran a careful blind test with Pixar, Amazon Prime Video, LG and the American Society of Cinematographers. 139 people, with their eyesight checked beforehand, watched the same clips in 4K and in 8K on an 88-inch LG 8K TV. Most of them couldn't tell the two apart. Only a few people with sharper-than-normal eyesight, sitting in the front row, noticed that two of the seven clips looked slightly better in 8K.
The reason is simple: there's a limit to how much detail your eyes can make out from a given distance. The table below shows how close you'd need to sit to see the extra detail, based on the sharpness of normal 20/20 eyesight. Find your screen and compare it with how far away you usually sit.
| Screen | Closer than this, 4K beats 1080p | Closer than this, 8K beats 4K |
|---|---|---|
| 13-inch laptop | 0.54 m (1.8 ft) | 0.27 m (0.9 ft) |
| 27-inch monitor | 1.07 m (3.5 ft) | 0.54 m (1.8 ft) |
| 55-inch TV | 2.18 m (7.2 ft) | 1.09 m (3.6 ft) |
| 65-inch TV | 2.58 m (8.5 ft) | 1.29 m (4.2 ft) |
| 85-inch TV | 3.37 m (11.1 ft) | 1.68 m (5.5 ft) |
So on a 65-inch TV, 8K starts to matter once you sit within about 1.3 meters of it. That's closer than most couches. On a laptop, the same math says even 4K is wasted unless your face is almost touching the screen.
What 8K Costs You in Disk Space
To see the real cost, we checked the file sizes YouTube offers for one 8K video, a 101-second nature clip. The numbers below are for the picture only, without sound:
| Quality | Size for 101 seconds | About this much per hour |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p | 67 MB | 2.4 GB |
| 4K | about 310 MB | 11 GB |
| 8K | 635 MB | 23 GB |
This was a demo video full of fine detail and motion, so ordinary videos will usually be smaller. The proportions are what matter: 8K takes about twice the space of 4K and around ten times the space of 1080p. On a laptop with 256 GB of storage, about eleven hours of 8K would fill the whole drive.
Will It Even Play?
Size isn't the only catch. YouTube offers 8K in just one format, AV1, a newer way of compressing video that needs fairly recent hardware to play smoothly. Even YouTube's own app hides 8K on TVs that can't decode AV1.
On a Mac, this matters a lot. QuickTime, the Mac's built-in player, can only open AV1 on Macs with an M3 chip or newer. On Intel, M1 and M2 Macs, a downloaded 8K video simply won't open. We explain this, and two easy fixes, in why some videos won't play on a Mac.
The same goes for many older TVs and computers. They may open an AV1 file but stutter, because they have to do all the decoding work without help from the hardware. If the compression formats themselves are new to you, our post on MP4 vs HEVC vs AV1 explains them in plain terms.
When 8K Does Make Sense
There are a few real reasons to download 8K anyway:
- You own an 8K TV and sit close to it.
- You edit video and want to crop or zoom in on part of the picture without it getting blurry.
- You're saving something that may disappear from YouTube, and you want the best copy that exists, even if you can't see all of it today.
Outside of those, 8K is a hard sell, and TV makers have noticed. According to the research firm Omdia, 8K TVs make up about 0.1% of TV sales. Yearly shipments were expected to drop by about 65% between 2022 and 2025. LG and Sony have stopped making them, which leaves Samsung as the last major brand still selling 8K TVs.
How to Get the Right Quality Every Time
The easiest approach is to set a quality range once, instead of picking a resolution for every video. In our Video Downloader, open Preferences and go to the Download tab. Under Video quality selection, choose an option such as 1080p or lower or 4K or higher. The app then picks the best quality within that range for each video. Our step-by-step guide to downloading 4K video walks through the rest.
If you're on a Mac and want every file to open in QuickTime, there's one more setting. On the Video output tab, turn on use only macOS compatible codecs for MP4 format. The app will then stick to formats every Mac can play. The trade-off is quality: on YouTube, those formats usually stop at 1080p, so you'll rarely get 4K with this setting on.
The Bottom Line
A bigger number in the quality menu doesn't mean a better picture on your screen. For a phone, tablet or laptop, 1080p is plenty. For a 4K TV, 4K is the sensible top. Save 8K for the rare case where you have both an 8K screen and a seat close to it, and enough free space to spare.
Want 4K or 8K when it's worth it, and 1080p when it isn't? Set the quality range once and every download follows it.
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