The Story

Liveclipper was built to solve a personal frustration: clipping specific moments from long YouTube videos or livestreams. The web app let users specify timestamps and get downloadable clips.

Technical Architecture

• Laravel backend with queue workers
• Vue.js frontend for clip selection
• AWS ECS for scalable video processing
• S3 for temporary clip storage
• Lambda for cleanup tasks

The Downfall

The app worked great until Google started blocking AWS IP ranges from accessing YouTube. YT-DLP, the tool used for downloading, became unreliable from cloud infrastructure. The cost of residential proxies made the project unsustainable.

Lessons Learned

Building on third-party platforms is risky. This project taught me about the importance of having fallback strategies and not depending too heavily on services you do not control.