Five Sizes, All Widescreen
Dailymotion is the tidiest of the major platforms on this point. Every video gets the same ladder of cover files, named by height — 1080, 720, 480, 360 and 240 — and all five keep the 16:9 frame. The widths come out a little under the round figure you might expect: a 1080 file measures about 1908 pixels across rather than 1920. Each card prints the size read from the file itself, so what you see is what you save.
That is a genuine advantage over YouTube, where three of the five stored sizes are 4:3 and quietly crop the sides off the artwork. Whatever size you take here shows the same composition the creator designed.
How the Lookup Works
Dailymotion publishes a public data endpoint that returns the cover addresses for any public video. This page asks it directly from your browser, reads the five addresses out of the reply, and shows them. No key, no account, no server of ours in the middle — and nothing about the request is stored.
Which Links Work
dailymotion.com/video/x8lhcv8— the ordinary page address.dai.ly/x8lhcv8— the short share address.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x8lhcv8— the embed address.x8lhcv8— the bare video ID.
Playlist and channel addresses will not work, because they identify a collection rather than a single video. Open the video itself first, then copy that address.
Picking the Right Size
Take the 1080 file unless you have a reason not to. It is the original, and every smaller file is a scaled copy of it — starting from the largest and reducing it yourself always beats downloading a pre-shrunk version, especially where a cover carries text.
The smaller files are useful for one thing: checking legibility. If the 240 version is unreadable, so is the thumbnail in a crowded feed. Our guide to contrast and colour covers what survives that reduction, and the principles apply on any platform.
For other sources, use the YouTube extractor, the Vimeo downloader, or the MP4 frame grabber for files already on your device.