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Get video metadata and video files from URLs

Source: R/api_hidden.r, R/shorthands.r
tt_videos_hidden.Rd

[Works on: Unofficial API]

Usage

tt_videos_hidden(
  video_urls,
  save_video = TRUE,
  overwrite = FALSE,
  dir = ".",
  cache_dir = NULL,
  sleep_pool = 1:10,
  max_tries = 5L,
  cookiefile = NULL,
  verbose = interactive(),
  slideshows = "ask",
  ...
)

tt_videos(...)

Arguments

video_urls

vector of URLs or IDs to TikTok videos.

save_video

logical. Should the videos be downloaded.

overwrite

logical. If save_video=TRUE and the file already exists, should it be overwritten?

dir

directory to save videos files to.

cache_dir

if set to a path, one RDS file with metadata will be written to disk for each video. This is useful if you have many videos and want to pick up where you left if something goes wrong.

sleep_pool

a vector of numbers from which a waiting period is randomly drawn.

max_tries

how often to retry if a request fails.

cookiefile

path to your cookiefile. Usually not needed after running auth_hidden once. See vignette("unofficial-api", package = "traktok") for more information on authentication.

verbose

should the function print status updates to the screen?

slideshows

what to do when a URL turns out to be a slideshow (photo post). TikTok does not include data for these in the page source, so they have to be opened in a (headless) browser, which is slower and needs the chromote package. "ask" (the default) asks whether to do that once all other posts are collected (treated as FALSE in non-interactive sessions), TRUE does it without asking, and FALSE leaves the rows empty. See tt_slideshow_hidden.

...

handed to tt_videos_hidden (for tt_videos) and (further) to tt_request_hidden.

Value

a data.frame containing post metadata.

Details

The function will wait between scraping two videos to make it less obvious that a scraper is accessing the site. The period is drawn randomly from the sleep_pool and multiplied by a random fraction.

Note that the video file has to be requested in the same session as the metadata. So while the URL to the video file is included in the metadata, this link will not work in most cases.

Slideshows (photo posts) are collected differently, see slideshows and tt_slideshow_hidden. Their images are downloaded instead of a video file if save_video = TRUE.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
tt_videos("https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7106594312292453675")
} # }