Downloading TikTok Videos with Python (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of the series.

Part 1 covered extracting profile data and video lists (via HasData + TikTok endpoints). Here, we’ll use those results to download videos.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Basic Downloader
• Handling Expired Links
• Notes

Requirements

You’ll need:

• Python 3.8+
• requests
• HasData API key (if you want to refresh links)

pip install requests

Basic downloader

Simple, memory-safe way to download each video file in chunks.

import json
import requests
import os
import time

DOWNLOAD_FOLDER = "tiktok_videos"
os.makedirs(DOWNLOAD_FOLDER, exist_ok=True)

HEADERS = {
    "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/141.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
    "accept": "*/*",
    "referer": "https://www.tiktok.com",
}

def download_video(url, filepath):
    try:
        with requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS, stream=True, timeout=30) as r:
            r.raise_for_status()
            with open(filepath, "wb") as f:
                for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=8192):
                    if chunk:
                        f.write(chunk)
        print(f"[OK] {filepath}")
        return True
    except requests.HTTPError as e:
        print(f"[HTTP {e.response.status_code}] {filepath}")
        return False
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"[ERROR] {filepath}: {e}")
        return False


# Load video list from Part 1
with open("videos_clean_full.json", "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    videos = json.load(f)

for video in videos:
    vid = video.get("id")
    url = video.get("downloadAddr")
    if not url:
        print(f"[WARN] No link for {vid}")
        continue

    path = os.path.join(DOWNLOAD_FOLDER, f"{vid}.mp4")
    if os.path.exists(path):
        print(f"[SKIP] {vid}")
        continue

    download_video(url, path)
    time.sleep(0.5)

This handles streaming, writes to disk in chunks, and skips existing files.

Handling expired links

TikTok download links expire fast. If you reuse old links, you’ll get 403 Forbidden. When that happens, request a fresh link using HasData.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import json

def refresh_download_url(video_page_url, api_key, country="DE"):
    api_url = "https://api.hasdata.com/scrape/web"
    payload = {
        "url": video_page_url,
        "proxyType": "residential",
        "proxyCountry": country,
        "blockResources": False,
        "wait": 1000,
        "jsRendering": True
    }
    headers = {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "x-api-key": api_key
    }

    try:
        r = requests.post(api_url, headers=headers, json=payload, timeout=30)
        r.raise_for_status()
        data = r.json()
        html = data.get("content")
        if not html:
            return None

        soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
        script = soup.find("script", id="__UNIVERSAL_DATA_FOR_REHYDRATION__")
        if not script or not script.string:
            return None

        raw = json.loads(script.string)
        items = raw.get("__DEFAULT_SCOPE__", {}).get("webapp.video-detail", {}).get("itemModule", {})
        for v in items.values():
            d = v.get("video", {}).get("downloadAddr")
            if d:
                return d
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"[ERROR] refresh: {e}")
    return None

Retry failed downloads and refresh URLs on 403.

MAX_RETRIES = 3
HASDATA_API_KEY = "YOUR-API-KEY"

for v in videos:
    vid = v.get("id")
    url = v.get("downloadAddr")
    page = f"https://www.tiktok.com/@funny_funny66066/video/{vid}"
    path = os.path.join(DOWNLOAD_FOLDER, f"{vid}.mp4")

    attempts = 0
    while attempts < MAX_RETRIES:
        ok = download_video(url, path)
        if ok:
            break
        attempts += 1
        print(f"[RETRY] {vid} ({attempts}) — refreshing URL")
        url = refresh_download_url(page, HASDATA_API_KEY) or url
        time.sleep(1)

    if not ok:
        print(f"[FAIL] {vid}")

Notes

More useful resources:

• How to Scrape TikTok with Python
• Join our Discord
• Tiktok Scraping Examples in Python and NodeJS (GitHub)

Comments

[Tousif]

The expired-link issue is probably one of the biggest things to account for when building a TikTok downloader this way. A direct downloadAddr isn't necessarily something you can treat as a permanent file URL, so refreshing it when you receive a 403 makes sense.

The Python approach is especially useful when you're downloading a larger set of videos or want the whole process automated. For someone who only needs to save an occasional public TikTok video, though, setting up Python, API access, scraping and URL refreshing can be overkill. In that case, a browser-based option such as Clipzun can be more convenient since you can simply provide the video URL and download it without setting up a development environment.

So I'd see these as two different use cases rather than competing approaches: Python for automation and batch workflows, and a web-based Video Downloader for quick individual downloads.