VideoDownloadBot

@VideoDownloadBot

@VideoDownloadBot is a free Telegram bot that downloads videos. Send it a link from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, VK, Twitch, Dailymotion, SoundCloud or one of many other sites and it sends the video back in the chat, up to 2 GB. Add it to a group, or mention it in any chat, and it works there too. Reddit, Vimeo and Facebook links need a login and don't work. Open source (MIT), built on yt-dlp.

How to use: open t.me/VideoDownloadBot, press Start, paste a link.

(videodownloadbot.com is a different bot, not this one.)

Website: videodl.borodutch.com (supported sites, how to use it in chats and groups, FAQ).

How it works

Send it a link (or post one in a group it's in) and it replies with the video. Downloads go through yt-dlp; every sent file's Telegram file_id is kept in SQLite, so the same link (or the same video under another link) is resent instantly. Originally developed by MaxiFilippov.

Run

bun install
TOKEN=123:abc bun bot.ts

Needs yt-dlp and ffmpeg on PATH (the Dockerfile ships both). bun test runs the checks.

Environment

• TOKEN: Telegram bot token
• BOT_API_URL: Bot API server, default https://api.telegram.org. Point it at a local Bot API server (--local) to upload up to 2000 MB instead of 50 MB
• COOKIES: Netscape cookies file for yt-dlp (a logged-in YouTube session), default /cookies.txt, skipped if missing. It seeds DATA_DIR/cookies.txt, which keeps the cookies yt-dlp refreshes; replacing COOKIES reseeds it. Every 6 h the bot opens Watch Later to keep the session in use and checks it's still logged in
• ADMIN_ID: Telegram user ID that gets a DM when the YouTube login dies
• STORAGE_CHAT: chat the bot uploads guest-mode videos to before putting them into its guest reply (each upload is deleted right away), default ADMIN_ID (guest replies fail without either)
• DATA_DIR: where bot.sqlite lives, default ./data (/data in Docker)
• MAX_DOWNLOADS: parallel downloads, default 3
• STATS_PORT: port of the stats endpoint, default 8080. GET /stats returns chat and user totals and new ones per UTC day (counted from when the bot first sees them; ids only, nothing else is stored) for stats.borodutch.com. Don't give it a public domain
• PROMO_TOKEN: turns on cross-promotion experiments (promo.ts): campaigns come from PROMO_URL (default https://lumen.borodutch.com/go/campaigns.json, edited in Prime Radiant's go/campaigns.json), and the token signs the seen/shown events and salts the user hashes in them. Unset, or PROMO=off, means no promos at all. Promos only go into private-chat replies, at most one per reply and one per person per campaign's cap_days, and every person stays in the same arm (a variant or the holdout, which never sees one). Links to another bot are native deep links (t.me/<bot>?start=<campaign>-<variant>-vdb, which Telegram opens in the app; the promoted bot reports the /start), channel invite links go as they are, and only web pages go through the tracking redirect
• EGRESS_DENY: comma-separated addresses or CIDRs (IPv4 and IPv6) that yt-dlp may never reach, on top of the private, loopback and link-local ranges it's always kept out of. Set it on deploy to the server's own public IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix (e.g. 1.2.3.4/32,2a01:4f8:c0c:1::/64). Those addresses look public, but they lead to every port docker publishes on the host (the panel, the reverse proxy's internal routes), and a cloud firewall doesn't filter traffic that starts on the host. If docker gives containers global IPv6 addresses from a routed prefix outside the host's /64, list that prefix too. A malformed entry stops the bot at startup

In groups the bot needs privacy mode off (BotFather → Bot Settings → Group Privacy) or admin rights to see links. There it only picks up links to sites yt-dlp has a dedicated extractor for (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X and so on) and stays quiet when such a page has no video; other links, like a bare domain or an article, are ignored unless the bot is mentioned. Replying to a message with a link and mentioning the bot (@VideoDownloadBot) downloads the replied-to link. With Guest Mode on (BotFather Mini App → bot settings), the same mention works in any chat, even ones the bot isn't in.

License

MIT