- A fast and simple video clipper for YouTube, X, Instagram, and more.
- Just paste a link, optionally select a start and end time, and download the exact clip you need.
- The Chrome extension auto-detects videos from your current tab to make clipping even faster.
Architecture
Key Features
Lossless On-the-Fly Slicing: Utilizes FFmpeg's stream-copy mode (-c copy) to slice remote video streams directly at the source. This ensures zero quality loss and keeps server execution speeds under 2 seconds.
Multi-Platform Compatibility: Deep integration with yt-dlp ensures robust stream extraction across YouTube, X (Twitter), Instagram, Reddit, Vimeo, Streamable, and Twitch.
One-Click Chrome Extension: A helper Manifest V3 extension that auto-detects video links in your current tab and fills the clipper dashboard automatically, reducing clipping time to a single click.
Bandwidth Efficient: By targeting and slicing remote stream segments directly, the platform uses up to 95% less bandwidth than traditional clippers that download the full video before editing.
Why I built this
Downloading and editing video clips from modern social platforms is a surprisingly frustrating experience: you are either forced to download the entire video file (wasting gigabytes of data and disk space) or rely on sketchy, ad-ridden web downloaders that compromise your browser's security.
The moment I started experimenting with stream processing, I realized that we could leverage server-side stream resolution (yt-dlp) and combine it with FFmpeg's ability to seek remote inputs directly.
I built ClipGrab to solve this exact problem: a private, open-source tool that lets you grab exactly the clip you need in seconds without any ads, bloat, or installation hassle.