Python Web Scraping Tutorial: Downloading YY Live Videos via API

This article introduces a practical Python web‑scraping example that targets the YY Live platform. It explains why the YY Live API is chosen, shows the API endpoint https://api-tinyvideo-web.yy.com/home/tinyvideosv2, and describes how to send HTTP requests using the requests library.

Simulating the request

url = 'https://api-tinyvideo-web.yy.com/home/tinyvideosv2'
headers = {
    'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.105 Safari/537.36'
}
response = requests.get(url=url, headers=headers)
data = response.json()

The JSON response contains a list of video records. Each record holds a resurl field with the actual video link and a yyNum identifier that can be used to name the file.

Parsing the data

for d in data_list:
    video_title = str(d['yyNum']) + '.mp4'
    video_url = d['resurl']
    video_content = requests.get(url=video_url, headers=headers).content
    with open('video\\' + video_title, mode='wb') as f:
        f.write(video_content)
        print('保存完成:', video_title)

The script saves each video to a local video directory and prints a confirmation message.

Looped downloading

Because the API returns different data on each call, the script can be wrapped in a loop to fetch multiple pages and download more videos.

url = 'https://api-tinyvideo-web.yy.com/home/tinyvideosv2'
headers = {
    'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.105 Safari/537.36'
}
for _ in range(page+1):
    response = requests.get(url=url, headers=headers)
    data = response.json()
    data_list = data['data']['data']
    print(data_list)

Complete script

import requests

def fire(page):
    url = 'https://api-tinyvideo-web.yy.com/home/tinyvideosv2'
    headers = {
        'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.105 Safari/537.36'
    }
    for _ in range(page+1):
        response = requests.get(url=url, headers=headers)
        data = response.json()
        data_list = data['data']['data']
        print(data_list)
        for d in data_list:
            video_title = str(d['yyNum']) + '.mp4'
            video_url = d['resurl']
            video_content = requests.get(url=video_url, headers=headers).content
            with open('video\\' + video_title, mode='wb') as f:
                f.write(video_content)
                print('保存完成:', video_title)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    fire(10)

The article concludes by noting that this approach leverages the public API for quick results, and future posts will explore page‑scraping techniques to collect videos from different hosts and categories.