Instagram Video Downloader

Three URL shapes, one tool

Instagram doesn't give you one kind of video. It gives you three, URL-wise, and they've been shifting labels under our feet for years.

/p/SHORTCODE/ — the general-purpose post URL, could be anything. Video, photo, carousel, whatever the creator picked. Paste it and we figure out the media type server-side.

/reel/SHORTCODE/ means explicitly a Reel — vertical short-form, ≤ 90 seconds shot in-app or up to 15 minutes if pre-uploaded from camera roll.

/tv/SHORTCODE/ is old IGTV. Meta retired the IGTV brand in July 2022 and folded long-form video into regular posts — Instagram's own help center still references the transition at https://help.instagram.com/. The old URLs kept working, so a /tv/ link these days is almost always something from 2019–2021.

All three work. We normalize them before parsing.

About that word "HD"

Instagram's CDN serves whatever resolution the creator uploaded, capped at 1920×1080. "HD" in the app means "we're giving you 1080p right now instead of 720p because your connection can handle it." Not some secret high-res tier you unlock.

For downloads: shot on a recent phone, uploaded clean, 1080p is there. Shot on something older or downsampled by Instagram at upload — you'll see 720p as the top option and that's the ceiling. We don't hide the truth behind a "HD" label. The resolution number is the resolution you get.

The "Login required" screen

Sometimes the downloader returns a "login required" message for a video you can swear was public. You tapped through from a friend's share, it played fine in your browser, but our backend refuses it.

That's Instagram's account-gating flag — not the same as private. Meta sometimes pushes a login wall on accounts they've flagged for regional restriction, age gating, or manual review. From the outside the post looks normal. From the outside, trying to fetch it without an authenticated session, the CDN 401s us.

We do not log into Instagram to get around this. If you want that video badly enough, you'd have to view it through your own logged-in Instagram session and screen-record it yourself.

Volume is quieter than you expect. That's IG, not us.

Instagram runs loudness normalization on uploads. Tracks mixed too hot get pushed down. Whisper-voice reels get pushed up. The result is a fairly flat dynamic range across the feed, which is nice on the algorithm side but unhelpful when you want to pull a cinematic clip and match it to other audio.

Your downloaded MP4 has whatever IG normalized to. Raising gain post-download works, but will reveal compression artifacts that were hidden by the normalization. If audio fidelity matters, grab the source from wherever the creator originally posted it.

Copy-link on mobile — every path ends in the same place

iOS gives you the three-dot menu on the post → "Copy link". Long-press the share icon works too, the share sheet just labels it "Copy" there.

Android, same three-dot menu, same "Copy link". Some builds tuck it behind the share icon first — one extra tap, that's all.

Mobile browser? Three dots under the video → "Copy link". No app install needed to grab the URL.

You'll often see a long ?igsh= parameter after the shortcode. Sharing-attribution blob. We strip it before parsing — include it or don't, either way.

When a carousel is hiding a video

Carousels (multi-slide posts) can mix photos and videos in the same post. You'll paste a /p/ URL expecting one thing and get back a numbered list — slide 1 video, slide 2 photo, slide 3 photo, whatever the creator put there.

Each video slide gets its own Download button, each photo slide gets one too. No one-click "save all" yet; ZIP-per-post is on the list.