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I Built a Multi-Platform Video Downloader API in 2 Days

If you've ever needed to programmatically download videos from social media — for content repurposing, analytics, or automation — you know the pain. Every platform has its own quirks, most existing APIs only support one platform, and the good ones are expensive.

So I built my own. Here's what I learned.

The Problem

I needed to extract video URLs from multiple platforms:

YouTube Shorts (no login needed)
TikTok / Douyin
Instagram Reels
Bilibili

What I found on the market:

Single-platform APIs: great for one use case, useless if you need more
Expensive all-in-one tools: $50-100/month for basic access
Open-source tools like yt-dlp: powerful but not API-friendly

The Solution

A single API endpoint that handles 10+ platforms. Built with:

FastAPI — async Python, auto-generated docs
yt-dlp — battle-tested extraction engine
Docker + Render — $0 hosting for the first 50k requests

# Core extraction — dead simple
def _extract(url: str) -> dict:
    with yt_dlp.YoutubeDL({"quiet": True, "format": "best"}) as ydl:
        info = ydl.extract_info(url, download=False)
    return {
        "title": info["title"],
        "url": info["url"],
        "thumbnail": info["thumbnail"],
        # ...more metadata
    }

API Usage

curl -X POST https://video-downloader-api-eyqj.onrender.com/extract \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dQw4w9WgXcQ"}'

Returns:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
    "url": "https://manifest.googlevideo.com/...",
    "duration": 213,
    "view_count": 1786552159
  }
}

What Works (and What Doesn't)

Platform	Status	Notes
YouTube	Great	Shorts + regular, no auth
Instagram	Works	Needs cookies for some content
TikTok	Tricky	Server IPs get blocked, exploring proxy rotation
Bilibili	Works	Some anti-bot measures
Douyin	Works	Requires browser cookies

Lessons Learned

1. yt-dlp is a beast. It handles 1800+ sites. Wrapping it in FastAPI took 30 lines of code. The real work was error handling — each platform fails differently.

2. Geo-restrictions are the silent killer. TikTok blocked my Render server IP immediately. If you're building a public API, budget for proxy infrastructure from day one.

3. Cookie support is essential. Chinese platforms (Douyin, Xiaohongshu) require fresh browser cookies. I added a X-Cookie header that accepts Netscape-format cookies exported from the browser.

4. Free hosting is possible for MVPs. Render's free tier + Docker auto-deploy means I pay $0 while validating the idea.