clienty

A media downloader for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Paste a link, pick a format (MP4 or MP3) and quality, and clienty fetches and converts it for you.

Built as a full-stack project: React frontend, Express API, and a Python + yt-dlp/ffmpeg backend pipeline for the actual media processing.

• Download video (MP4) or audio-only (MP3) from YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram
• Quality selection (up to 1080p for video, up to 320kbps for audio)
• Clean "customs declaration" themed UI
• No database, no accounts — fully stateless, paste-link-and-go

Client Side/Frontend

• React + Vite
• Plain CSS/CSS3 (Space Mono + Fraunces fonts)

Server side/Backend

• Node.js + Express
• Python 3 + yt-dlp
• FFmpeg (audio/video merging and encoding)
• Deno (JS runtime yt-dlp uses to solve YouTube's PO token challenge)

React (UI) ──POST /api/download──▶ Express ──spawns──▶ Python script
                                                              │
                                                        yt-dlp + ffmpeg
                                                              │
                                                    downloads & converts file
                                                              │
                                       ◀── streams file back ─┘

Express doesn't do any media processing itself — it just orchestrates the Python script, waits for it to finish, finds the output file, sends it back to the client, then deletes the temp file.

Make sure these are installed and available on your system PATH before running:

• Node.js (v18+)
• Python 3
• yt-dlp — pip install yt-dlp
• FFmpeg — needed to merge video/audio streams and convert to MP3
• Deno — required by yt-dlp for YouTube extraction (JS challenge solving)

Verify each is working:

node -v
python3 --version
ffmpeg -version
deno --version

clienty/
├── server/          # Express API + Python/yt-dlp processing
│   ├── server.js
│   ├── routes/
│   ├── scripts/
│   └── temp/        # temp downloads, cleaned up after each request
└── client/          # React frontend (Vite)
    └── src/

git clone https://github.com/Caxerion/clienty.git
cd clienty

cd server
npm install
pip install yt-dlp --break-system-packages   # or without the flag, depending on your setup
node server.js

Server runs on http://localhost:3000.

cd client
npm install
npm run dev

Client runs on http://localhost:5173.

Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser to use the app.

Downloads and converts a video/audio file, returning it as a binary file response.

Request body:

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...",
  "format": "mp4",
  "quality": "1080p"
}

Response: binary file stream (Content-Disposition: attachment) on success, or a JSON error object on failure.

• No progress indicator during processing — the request blocks until the file is fully downloaded and converted
• No input validation for unsupported platforms yet — invalid URLs will just fail on the Python side
• Instagram content may occasionally require authentication (cookies) depending on the post
• No persistence — nothing is saved between requests; temp files are deleted immediately after being sent

This is only for personal project. Not affiliated with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or yt-dlp.