Developer builds self-hosted X/Twitter video downloader in 463 lines of Node.js

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A developer frustrated with ad-heavy, privacy-questionable third-party sites built a self-hosted web app to download X/Twitter videos. The tool, called xdl, uses yt-dlp as its primary extraction backend and FxTwitter API as a fallback, requiring zero npm dependencies beyond Node.js and ffmpeg. Users can paste a tweet link to get a video preview, select quality from 270p to 720p or higher, and download an MP4 directly to their device. For 1080p content, which X serves only as HLS streams, the server merges video and audio server-side via ffmpeg before delivering the file. The project is open source under the MIT license and is designed to run on a personal server or laptop, keeping all data private and off third-party infrastructure.

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