nilaoda/bbdown

BBDown is a free, command-line tool for downloading videos from Bilibili, the Chinese video platform. You run it by typing a command in your terminal and giving it a Bilibili video URL or ID, and it downloads the video to your computer. The README is written primarily in Chinese, reflecting its main audience. The tool supports a wide range of content types on Bilibili: regular videos, TV dramas, courses, playlists, collections, and personal channel archives. It can also download subtitles (converting them to the common SRT format), cover images, and danmaku, which are the scrolling audience comments Bilibili is known for. You can download just the video track, just the audio track, or the full merged file with everything combined. Quality options are extensive. BBDown supports standard resolutions up to 8K, as well as HDR and Dolby Vision formats. You can tell it which video encoding to prefer (AVC, HEVC, or AV1) and which quality level to prioritize, using a simple comma-separated list in the command. If you want to pick from available options interactively rather than specifying in advance, there is an interactive mode for that. For downloading, BBDown uses multiple threads by default to speed things up. It can also call an external tool called aria2c if you prefer that. Merging separate audio and video streams into a single file requires either ffmpeg or mp4box to be installed separately. You log in to your Bilibili account by scanning a QR code, which gives access to member-only content. A config file lets you store your preferred settings so you do not have to retype them every time. BBDown is available as a standard dotnet tool, so if you already have the .NET environment installed you can get it with a single install command. Pre-built binaries are also published on the GitHub releases page for those who do not want to build from source. The project states it is intended for personal learning, research, and non-commercial use only.