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Quick start

From an empty terminal to a real video, its comments, and its bullet-chat, in a handful of commands.

This walks the core loop: resolve an id, read a video's full metadata, and pull its comments and danmaku. Every command here hits live data and finishes in a second or two. No login required.

1. Resolve an id

bili id tells you what a string is before you do anything with it:

bili id BV17x411w7KC

kind   video
bvid   BV17x411w7KC
aid    170001
url    https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV17x411w7KC

It accepts any form: an av number, a BV string, a space.bilibili.com link, an ss/ep season or episode, and more. The other commands accept all the same forms, so you rarely call id directly; it is just the quickest way to see how something will be classified.

2. Read a video

bili video BV17x411w7KC --fields bvid,aid,title,owner_name,view_count,pubdate_text

bvid          aid     title                     owner_name  view_count  pubdate_text
BV17x411w7KC  170001  【MV】保加利亚妖王AZIS视频合辑    冰封.虾子      45703352    2011-11-09 21:55:33

The table is a projection of a much richer record. Ask for JSON to see everything the API returns:

bili video BV17x411w7KC -o json

3. Pull the conversation

Every comment and reply on the video, one JSON object per line:

bili comments BV17x411w7KC -o jsonl | head

The bullet-chat (danmaku) for the video, decoded from protobuf into rows:

bili danmaku BV17x411w7KC -n 5

progress  mode  color     content
1200      1     16777215  first!
3400      1     16777215  classic
...

4. Find things

Search, and feed the results into another command:

bili search lofi -o url | head
bili popular -n 5             # the popular feed
bili trending                # current hot-search terms

5. Compose

Output that pipes is the point. Resolve every search hit to full metadata:

bili search lofi -o url | bili video -

Crawl a seed video plus its comments and related videos into JSONL files:

bili crawl BV17x411w7KC --out ./data --comments
ls ./data
# comments.jsonl  users.jsonl  videos.jsonl

Where to next

You have the core loop. From here:

2 min read