u/Legitimate-Debt-2533

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to build a SaaS web app that can download videos from a provided URL. The idea is that users paste a video link, and the app extracts a direct downloadable media link, such as an .mp4 URL, then lets the user download it or convert it to another format, quality, or resolution.

My current idea is to use:

• yt-dlp for extracting video links
• Proxies to help with access/rate-limit issues
• FFmpeg for converting videos to different formats and qualities

However, I’m not sure about the best architecture or where to start.

A few things I’m wondering about:

• What backend stack would be best for this?
• Should video processing happen in the main server, background workers, or separate processing servers?
• How should I handle large files and long conversion times?
• Are there better alternatives to yt-dlp and FFmpeg?

I want to build this properly and avoid bad design decisions early on.

Any advice, roadmap, or recommended tools would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to build a web app that can download videos from a provided URL. The idea is that users paste a video link, and the app extracts a direct downloadable media link, such as an .mp4 URL, then lets the user download it or convert it to another format, quality, or resolution.

My current idea is to use:

• yt-dlp for extracting video links
• Proxies to help with access/rate-limit issues
• FFmpeg for converting videos to different formats and qualities

However, I’m not sure about the best architecture or where to start.

A few things I’m wondering about:

• What backend stack would be best for this?
• Should video processing happen in the main server, background workers, or separate processing servers?
• How should I handle large files and long conversion times?
• Are there better alternatives to yt-dlp and FFmpeg?

I want to build this properly and avoid bad design decisions early on.

Any advice, roadmap, or recommended tools would be appreciated.

Thanks!