Grab
Universal Multi-Platform Video Ingestion Engine & Mobile PWA
Built a private, high-availability media extraction engine for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Backed by self-hosted Cobalt and yt-dlp microservice clusters, Traefik v3 routing, and native mobile Web Share Target integration.
The Engineering Case Study
The Problem
Public video downloader websites are infested with aggressive adware, malware popups, artificial download throttling, and frequent downtimes whenever upstream platform APIs change. Marketing teams were putting corporate workstations at security risk and losing momentum on time-sensitive ad campaigns.
How It Was Engineered
Grab pairs a distraction-free, dark-void PWA interface with a dedicated backend microservice cluster hosted on Cynthia's production VPS infrastructure ('Porkchop'). Video extraction requests are reverse-proxied through Traefik v3 and intelligently routed between isolated Cobalt and yt-dlp API instances. It implements the native W3C Web Share Target API, allowing social media managers to hit 'Share' from the native YouTube or TikTok app directly into Grab on mobile.
Engineering Hurdles Solved
Surviving upstream anti-bot countermeasures, CDN token rotations, and IP rate-limiting. Cynthia implemented automated health-check failover that seamlessly switches between extraction backends, rotating upstream user-agent headers and caching video stream metadata in memory to prevent duplicate fetch storms.
Business & Production Outcome
Provides marketing staff with a lightning-fast, malware-safe video workflow that downloads raw MP4/audio streams in under 3 seconds. Removed reliance on third-party scrapers and protected client media workflows under a secure, owned domain.