I keep a small folder of single-purpose web tools I've built for myself over the years, and most of them never see the light of day. This one did, because enough people kept asking me the same question that I figured it was worth cleaning up and sharing.
The problem
Someone posts a video, a GIF, or a set of photos on X (Twitter), and you want to keep a copy — for a write-up, a backup, or just because the post might get deleted. X doesn't give you a "download" button for any of this. Your options end up being a browser extension you have to trust with a lot of permissions, a sketchy site full of redirect ads, or digging through devtools for the raw media URL by hand.
What I built
X Video Downloader is a single page that does one thing: you paste the link to a public X post, and it surfaces the downloadable video, GIF, or image carousel from that post as an MP4 (HD or SD, depending on what the post itself has available) or the original images.
A few constraints I kept on purpose:
- No login, no account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing of yours stored.
- Public posts only. It can't touch anything behind a login wall, and it isn't meant to — that's not a bug to report, it's the boundary.
- One job. No audio extraction, no Space recordings, no bulk/batch mode. If you need those, I have a separate, more full-featured tool for that; this one is intentionally the stripped-down version.
Why a separate tool instead of a feature flag
I already maintain a more full-featured X downloader that also handles audio conversion and Space recordings. I built this one anyway because most visits to that tool are people who just want a video or a GIF, fast, without wading through options they don't need. Splitting it into its own single-purpose page made the common case faster and the page itself simpler to maintain.
What's next
Mobile-friendliness and load speed are the two things I keep iterating on, since most traffic comes from someone on their phone trying to save a clip they just watched. If you try it and hit something that doesn't work on a specific post, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.
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