Videos

A video is the center of bilibili, and four commands cover it: video for metadata, related for what sits next to it, streams for playable URLs, and danmaku for bullet-chat. All four accept any id form (BV…, av…, or a full watch URL).

Metadata

bili video BV17x411w7KC

The table view shows the headline fields; -o json is the full lossless record, including the owner, statistics, dimensions, and every part (page) of a multi-part video.

video takes more than one id at once, and reads ids from stdin with -, so it composes with any command that emits URLs:

bili video BV17x411w7KC BV1xx411c7XW       # several at once
bili search lofi -o url | bili video -      # everything a search found

Multi-part videos

Many videos have several parts, each with its own cid. The streams and danmaku commands work on one part at a time and default to the first. Pick another with --page (1-based) or by passing the cid directly with --cid:

bili video BVID -o json        # look at the "pages" array for the parts
bili danmaku BVID --page 2     # bullet-chat for the second part

Related videos

bili related BV17x411w7KC
bili related BV17x411w7KC -o url     # just the watch URLs

This is the same list bilibili shows alongside a video, which makes it the natural edge to follow when crawling.

Streams

bili streams BV17x411w7KC

streams lists the playable media URLs the API exposes for a part, with their quality, codec, and format. Use --quality to ask for a specific level. These are the URLs the player would use; bili does not download or decrypt anything, it just reports what is offered.

Bullet-chat

bili danmaku BV17x411w7KC

Each row is one comment that scrolls across the video: its progress (the millisecond offset where it appears), mode, color, fontsize, and content. The data arrives as protobuf and bili decodes it into plain records, so it sorts, filters, and pipes like anything else:

bili danmaku BVID -o jsonl | jq -r 'select(.progress < 10000) | .content'

See comments and danmaku for the conversation data in depth.