Sharing a video: download button removed

Microsoft changed how video links behave in SharePoint. Now when you send someone a link to a video, it often opens in that new Clipchamp-style viewer. That viewer hides the download button, even if you didn’t check any option to block downloading. It’s happening more and more. You’re not alone.

This isn’t something you can turn off. There’s no setting for it. SharePoint just assumes that if the file is a video, people should stream it. And when it does that, it strips out the download control.

The trick you mentioned with appending download=1 sometimes works, but only in some browsers, and yeah, Power Automate often breaks the URL formatting anyway. So it’s not reliable.

Folders won’t help either if you’re generating links one-by-one for each parent. And creating folders per student sounds like a nightmare.

The best workaround right now is to avoid SharePoint’s viewer completely. You can either force a direct download using a different kind of link, or just rename the file so it doesn’t look like a video file. If you rename it from .mp4 to something like .mp4_, then SharePoint won’t stream it, and users get a plain download prompt. They can rename it back afterward.

Or zip the file. That works too. Zipped files don’t open in any viewer. They just download.