Do Niconico Comments Download With the Video?

Updated 2026-09-19

Short answer: no, and not because of a limitation in any downloader. The comments were never part of the video. Here is how Niconico actually builds that effect, and what that means for a saved file.

1. 1
   Copy the video link

   From nicovideo.jp, or the short nico.ms link the Share button gives.

2. 2
   Paste it into VoomReel

   Paste into the box on the home page.

3. 3
   Download

   You get the video and audio merged into one MP4 — the picture as uploaded, with no comment overlay.

The comments are drawn by the player, not stored in the video

Niconico keeps the video file and the comment stream as two entirely separate things. The comments are a timed list — text, timestamp, position, colour — that the player fetches alongside the video and animates over the top as you watch.

That is why the same video looks different every time you open it: new comments have been added since. A video file cannot do that. Whatever is burned into a file is fixed forever.

Why nobody can give you a file with comments in it

To hand you an MP4 with danmaku in it, a tool would have to fetch the comment list, render it frame by frame over the video, and re-encode the whole thing. That is a video editing job, not a download — it takes real processing time per video, and the result is a re-encode, so it looks worse than the original.

Any service claiming to do it is doing exactly that somewhere. What you get back is not Niconico's file.

What you can keep

The video itself, at the quality Niconico serves it, with the audio merged back in — that is what VoomReel gives you.

If the comments matter to you, watch on Niconico. Nothing downloadable reproduces the experience, because the experience is partly that the comments keep changing.

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