video-download

video-download is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from maystudios/claude-skills. It costs 113 tokens per session (1,621 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for saving videos from Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter/X, Facebook, and more than 1,000 other sites as MP4 files. It uses yt-dlp, a command-line downloader, and can handle single videos, multiple links, or playlists.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to download one or more videos, save them to a chosen folder, download an entire playlist, or resume safely without saving the same files again.
Why use it?
It removes the need to download videos manually and can retry YouTube downloads when anti-bot checks block the first attempt.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to download one or more videos, save them to a chosen folder, download an entire playlist, or resume safely without saving the same files again.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add maystudios/claude-skills --skill video-download
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/maystudios/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for video-download

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for video-download

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/video-download.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 113 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,621 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high YARA Match · line 46
    YARA rule matched a known malware signature (reverse shell, backdoor, ransomware, C2 framework, or info stealer).
    Fix: Remove the malware payload or compromised file entirely. Investigate how it entered the skill and audit all other artifacts for additional indicators of compromise.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 106
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00113 $0.01621
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00811
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00324
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00162

Measured 11d ago against content hash d21821037817, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

video-download scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/download.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

video-download/SKILL.md · 161 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 161 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Video Download Skill

Wraps yt-dlp with automatic recovery for YouTube anti-bot challenges.

Tool

scripts/download.py — installs yt-dlp on first run, merges video+audio to MP4, auto-rotates strategies on bot detection, uses a download-archive for safe resume.

Workflow

  1. Collect all URLs from the user's request.
  2. Determine output directory (current working directory if unspecified).
  3. Decide single-video vs playlist mode:
    • User says "this video" / single URL → leave default (single-video).
    • User says "playlist" / "all videos" / passes a playlist?list= URL → add --playlist.
  4. Run the script. If YouTube bot detection hits, the script auto-rotates strategies.
  5. Report which files were saved and which strategy worked.

Usage

# Single video, current directory
python scripts/download.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."

# Multiple URLs to a folder
python scripts/download.py "URL1" "URL2" -o "/path/to/output"

# Full playlist as 720p MP4
python scripts/download.py "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=..." --playlist -o "./out"

# Force a specific browser for cookies (skips auto-rotation)
python scripts/download.py "URL" --cookies-from-browser chrome

# Force a manual cookies.txt file
python scripts/download.py "URL" --cookies "~/Downloads/www.youtube.com_cookies.txt"

# Higher quality
python scripts/download.py "URL" --max-height 1080

Flags

Flag Default Notes
-o, --output cwd Output directory
--max-height 720 Max video height (e.g. 1080, 480)
--playlist off Download full playlist; default is single-video
--cookies-from-browser auto Force one browser; skips auto-rotation
--cookies auto Force one cookies.txt file; skips auto-rotation
--no-archive off Disable .download-archive.txt resume tracking

Auto-Recovery Strategy Chain

When a request fails with bot-detection markers (Sign in to confirm, LOGIN_REQUIRED), the script automatically advances through these strategies in order, stopping at the first one that succeeds:

Read the full file on GitHub · 161 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 161 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A d21821037817

Subscribe to this mod's changes

video-download is a skill published in the GitHub repository maystudios/claude-skills (22 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 113 tokens to every session and 1,621 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.