douyin-download

Download Douyin (TikTok China) videos to local disk without needing yt-dlp, cookies, or login.

Workflow

Execute all steps in order.

Step 1 — Resolve Short URL

If the URL is a short link (v.douyin.com/xxx), resolve it first:

curl -sI "https://v.douyin.com/<ID>/" | grep -i location

Extract the full URL from the location: header. The numeric ID in /video// is the video_id_str (e.g. 7634389140783615232).

Step 2 — Fetch Mobile Page & Extract video_id

Fetch the mobile Douyin page and extract the internal video_id:

curl -sL "https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/<video_id_str>/" \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15" \
  -H "Referer: https://www.douyin.com/" \
  -o /tmp/dy_page.html

Extract video_id from the HTML:

grep -o 'video_id[^"]*"[^"]*"' /tmp/dy_page.html

This returns something like video_id=v0d00fg10000d7pc7dvog65j2bpvg940. The part after = is the internal_video_id.

Step 3 — Download Video

Construct the snssdk play URL and download:

curl -L "https://aweme.snssdk.com/aweme/v1/playwm/?video_id=<internal_video_id>&ratio=720p&line=0" \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15" \
  -H "Referer: https://www.douyin.com/" \
  -o ~/Downloads/<output_filename>.mp4

• playwm = 720p with Douyin watermark
• To get no-watermark version: replace playwm with play and append &watermark=0 (may need additional signature handling)
• Save to ~/Downloads/ using the video title as filename

Step 4 — Verify

Check file size and format:

ls -lh ~/Downloads/<output_filename>.mp4 && file ~/Downloads/<output_filename>.mp4

Key Notes

• No login required — the mobile endpoint (iesdouyin.com) works without authentication
• Download speed — typically reaches 10–15 MB/s on stable connections; a 100MB video finishes in ~10 seconds
• If download fails with 403/redirect: retry with a fresh curl -L (follow redirects) and verify the video_id is correct
• Watermark — playwm always includes Douyin watermark; getting no-watermark requires the play endpoint with signed parameters (complex, not covered here)
• Supported URLs: v.douyin.com/xxx short links and www.iesdouyin.com/share/video// direct links

Reference

See references/douyin_api.md for detailed endpoint documentation and troubleshooting.