Media Roller

A mobile friendly tool for downloading videos from social media. The backend is a Golang server that will take a URL (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, etc), download the video file, and return a URL to directly download the video. The video will be transcoded to produce a single mp4 file.

This is built on yt-dlp. yt-dlp will auto update every 12 hours to make sure it's running the latest nightly build.

Note: This was written to run on a home network and should not be exposed to public traffic. There's no auth.

Running

Make sure you have yt-dlp and FFmpeg installed then pull the repo and run:

./run.sh

Or for docker locally:

 ./docker-build.sh
 ./docker-run.sh

With Docker, published to both dockerhub and github.

• ghcr: docker pull ghcr.io/rroller/media-roller:master
• dockerhub: docker pull ronnieroller/media-roller

See:

• https://github.com/rroller/media-roller/pkgs/container/media-roller
• https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/ronnieroller/media-roller

The files are saved to the /download directory which you can mount as needed.

Environment variables

• MR_DOWNLOAD_DIR where videos are saved. Defaults to /download
• MR_PROXY will pass the value to yt-dlp witht he --proxy argument. Defaults to empty
• MR_MEDIA_LIST_ENABLED controls the Downloads library on the home page. Defaults to true; set to false to hide it.
• MR_COOKIES_DIR is the directory containing cookies.txt. Defaults to cookies (/app/cookies in Docker).

Cookies

Place a Netscape-format cookies.txt export in a directory on the server. When present, the app passes --cookies <directory>/cookies.txt to yt-dlp for downloads from both the web form and API. If the file is absent, downloads run without cookies. To refresh or remove cookies, replace or delete the file in that directory.

For local runs:

MR_COOKIES_DIR="/absolute/path/to/cookies" ./run.sh

For Docker, mount the directory containing cookies.txt:

docker run -p 3000:3000 \
  -v "$(pwd)/download:/download" \
  -v "/absolute/path/to/cookies:/app/cookies" \
  ronnieroller/media-roller

./docker-run.sh mounts ./cookies by default; set MR_COOKIES_DIR to use another host directory. The cookie file and directory must be writable by yt-dlp, which updates its cookie jar. Keep this directory outside the download and static folders. The default cookie directory and *cookies*.txt exports are excluded from Git and Docker build contexts.

Existing explicit yt-dlp options such as --cookies, --no-cookies, and --cookies-from-browser take precedence over the configured file.

API

To download a video directly, use the API endpoint:

/api/download?url=SOME_URL

For iOS Photos-compatible output, add preset=ios:

/api/download?preset=ios&url=SOME_URL

The iOS preset returns an MP4 encoded with H.264 video and AAC audio so the Shortcuts app can save downloaded videos directly to Photos.

Create a bookmarklet, allowing one click downloads (From a PC):

javascript:(location.href="http://127.0.0.1:3000/fetch?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href));

Integrating with mobile

After you have your server up, install this shortcut. Update the endpoint to your server address by editing the shortcut before running it.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/12d5ab16ee3b4aa48cccfcb305ca03e4

Unraid

media-roller is available in Unraid and can be found on the "Apps" tab by searching its name.