Suggestion: Built-in Social Media Video Import (Instagram, etc.)

[jackmoris436 0]

Hello Emby Team and Community,

First of all, thank you for such a powerful and flexible media server. Emby has become an important part of how many of us manage and stream our personal content.

I wanted to suggest a possible future feature that could make Emby even more useful for some users:

This could work like a simple instagram downloader for public videos, focused only on personal and offline use.

Many users discover short videos, reels, or clips on Instagram that they would like to keep for personal offline viewing or add to their local media collection (for example, educational clips, travel videos, or creative content). Currently, this usually requires third-party tools and manual steps.

It would be great if Emby could offer something like:

• an optional tool or plugin to import public Instagram videos

• simple URL-based importing

• saved videos appearing directly in the media library

• full respect for platform rules and personal use only

This would not be for redistribution, but only for private libraries and offline viewing, similar to how people already manage downloaded media files.

I understand there may be technical and policy challenges, but I wanted to share the idea and see what others think. Maybe this could be implemented as a plugin rather than a core feature.

Thanks for your time and for all the great work on Emby.

Best regards,
Jack Moris

[crusher11 1112]

There's no way this is possible to do without violating Meta TOS. 

[Suliamu 40]

There is often people requesting features to be put inside emby that already exists perfectly outside of it. 
For example often it's requested to implement certain storage providers. 
Rclone does already solve this question. For multiple providers. Everything you could wish for.
And in your case the tool you are looking for is yt-dlp. And there is countless wrappers for it, also with mediaserver integrations. Also with emby integration.
Point being is that for both cases in order to "maintain" functionality the emby team would have to do a lot of work and patching and testing just for those couple features, while
there is dedicated expert teams out there doing this already for free open source software. You just have to know about it and learn to use it.
And also the instagram downloader you linked there is most likely using yt-dlp. 
Basically every site in the internet offering download from fb, ig, X, tiktok, yt whatever uses yt-dlp.