Download Watermark‑Free Douyin Videos with a Simple Python Script

1. Use a Simpler Method

In a previous blog I constructed URLs to fetch Douyin short videos, but today I discovered a much simpler approach that eliminates many analysis steps.

The new method involves opening any Douyin user page (e.g., iQIYI Sports), opening the browser developer tools, selecting the Network tab, filtering XHR requests, and examining the captured packets.

In the preview tab, navigate to video → download_addr → url_list; the URLs listed there are the actual video links, hidden deep but directly usable.

Further inspection of the play_addr field reveals another link pointing to the watermark‑free version of the video.

2. Code

Install the required jsonpath module: pip install jsonpath The following Python script extracts video titles and watermark‑free URLs, then downloads the videos:

import requests
import json
import jsonpath

class Douyin:
    def page_num(self, max_cursor):
        # Random string required by the API
        random_field = '00nvcRAUjgJQBMjqpgesfdNJ72&dytk=4a01c95562f1f10264fb14086512f919'
        # Construct request URL
        url = ('https://www.iesdouyin.com/web/api/v2/aweme/post/'
               '?sec_uid=MS4wLjABAAAAU7Bwg8WznVaafqWLyLUwcVUf9LgrKGYmctJ3n5SwlOA'
               '&count=21&max_cursor=' + str(max_cursor) +
               '&aid=1128&_signature=' + random_field)
        # Request headers
        headers = {
            'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.129 Safari/537.36',
        }
        response = requests.get(url, headers=headers).text
        resp = json.loads(response)
        max_cursor = resp['max_cursor']
        for data in resp['aweme_list']:
            video_title = data['desc']
            video_url = jsonpath.jsonpath(data, '$..paly_addr')
            for a in video_url:
                video_realurl = a['url_list'][1]
            video = requests.get(video_realurl, headers=headers).content
            with open('t/' + video_title, 'wb') as f:
                print('Downloading:', video_title)
                f.write(video)
        if max_cursor == 0:
            return 1
        else:
            self.page_num(max_cursor)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    douyin = Douyin()
    douyin.page_num(max_cursor=0)

3. Advantages

This approach removes many URL‑construction steps, does not rely on a WebDriver (so no browser restrictions), runs faster, and directly yields watermark‑free videos.

4. Disadvantages

The method still requires a manually generated random string, making the process somewhat cumbersome.

Original article: https://www.cnblogs.com/cherish-hao/p/12828027.html