Downloading Bilibili Videos with Python: A Step‑by‑Step Guide Using Fiddler and Requests

The author wanted to download videos from Bilibili and, after guidance from a mentor, used Fiddler to capture the network traffic of a specific video page, identifying the video stream packet.

By inspecting the captured GET request, the URL and headers required for downloading the FLV video are revealed; the author then demonstrates a minimal Python script that uses requests.get() to fetch the video content and write it to a local file.

Example code:

<code>#######################################################################
import requests

with open("D:\video\bilibili.mp4", "wb") as f:
    f.write(requests.get(url, headers=headers, verify=False).content)  # verify=False skips SSL verification
    print("下载完成")  # core part only; fill in actual url and headers
# Note: prepend Host to the URL, e.g., http://<host>/upgcx....
#######################################################################</code>

The script works, but some videos may only download partially because the captured headers contain a Range parameter; removing this parameter allows full download. The essential headers reduce to two fields: the host (extracted from the URL) and the video identifier.

To obtain the full video URL, the author searches the page source for encrypted parameters such as hfa and hfb . These values appear in the HTML source and can be located with Fiddler’s search function.

Next, the tutorial shows how to retrieve a list of all videos from an uploader’s homepage. By clicking the “more” button, a JSON response containing video IDs and titles is captured. This JSON can be fetched with a simple GET request (cookies are not required) and parsed to enumerate videos.

The author notes that pagination was not implemented in the example; the script simply requests the first 100 videos, and adding pagination logic is straightforward.