Building a Chinese Drama Scraper – Feedback?

[jackylove369]

I'm thinking about building a tool for scraping/collecting Chinese short drama videos and would like to get some feedback from people who work with this type of content.

The idea is to make the workflow easier for finding and collecting short drama videos for editing and content research.

What features would you find most useful in a tool like this?

• Search/filter by drama or episode
• Automatic episode detection
• Batch downloading
• Subtitle extraction
• Metadata collection
• Other features?

Would love to hear what features or workflow improvements you think would actually be useful.

 

[Zephyroo]

sub extraction is going to be your biggest selling point if you can get it working right. most of these short dramas have hardcoded chinese subs which makes translating them for western audiences a huge pain. if you can add a feature that strips watermarks from douyin or kuaishou links and maybe does OCR to get the text, people will pay good money for that. batch downloading is basically a requirement at this point anyway... also need to make sure it bypasses the platform blocks because douyin changes their signatures constantly.

 

[UrbanClicks]

douyin signature changes will kill your tool weekly if you don't have a solid API bypass setup. if you can handle that, the real money is in finding what's already trending. we need a way to sort by view velocity or likes over the last 3-5 days so we aren't guessing which dramas to rip. also instead of just ocr, if your tool can output a clean srt file with timestamps, that saves hours of manual sync work when we push them to capcut.

 

[jackylove369]

sub extraction is going to be your biggest selling point if you can get it working right. most of these short dramas have hardcoded chinese subs which makes translating them for western audiences a huge pain. if you can add a feature that strips watermarks from douyin or kuaishou links and maybe does OCR to get the text, people will pay good money for that. batch downloading is basically a requirement at this point anyway... also need to make sure it bypasses the platform blocks because douyin changes their signatures constantly.

Thanks for the detailed feedback! Subtitle OCR, watermark handling, and batch downloading are definitely worth considering. Really appreciate the suggestions!

 

[Paul Q agency]

I'd prioritize episode detection, metadata collection, subtitle extraction, and strong search/filtering. Batch downloading could be useful too, but I'd make sure the tool is designed around content you have permission to collect and reuse.

 

[CloudMerchant]

yeah the tech side of keeping the scraper working is going to be a massive headache, douyin changes things constantly. if you can pull it off though, the real bottleneck for most of us is translation. if your tool can do the ocr and then auto translate the text to english using deepl or something, and give us a timed srt... that would save so much time. right now everyone is either doing it manually or paying VAs to sync everything in capcut. also need to make sure the video downloader doesn't trigger the platform shadowbans when we reupload, so clean metadata stripping is a must.

 

[jackylove369]

I'd prioritize episode detection, metadata collection, subtitle extraction, and strong search/filtering. Batch downloading could be useful too, but I'd make sure the tool is designed around content you have permission to collect and reuse.

Thanks for the feedback! Episode detection, metadata, subtitles, and search/filtering are definitely on my list. Appreciate it!

 

[winvanlim]

I'm thinking about building a tool for scraping/collecting Chinese short drama videos and would like to get some feedback from people who work with this type of content.

The idea is to make the workflow easier for finding and collecting short drama videos for editing and content research.

What features would you find most useful in a tool like this?

• Search/filter by drama or episode
• Automatic episode detection
• Batch downloading
• Subtitle extraction
• Metadata collection
• Other features?

Would love to hear what features or workflow improvements you think would actually be useful.

i need a tool for merging video + subtitles + watermark for reup such as dramabox, dramawave.
Do u support it?

 

[jackylove369]

I’ve built a beta version to test the features based on your feedback. Everything looks good and is working well so far.