Mastering Kick Clip Scraping: A Developer’s Guide

Scraping video clips from streaming platforms can be challenging, but with the right approach, it becomes quite manageable. A recent exploration into scraping Kick clips revealed some interesting insights and techniques that developers might find useful.

Kick, similar to Twitch in functionality, hosts numerous clips that can be accessed through their platform. When approaching such a scraping task, looking at available resources beyond the target platform itself can provide valuable hints.

Finding Scraping Clues in External Resources

One particularly useful discovery was streamcharts.com, which contained download code right in the HTML. The site offered a script labeled “download stream” that included essential information such as the clip ID and API URL. This script demonstrated a simple fetch operation to retrieve the video URL – providing a clear roadmap for the scraping process without needing to reverse-engineer Kick’s own implementation.

This highlights an important strategy: when scraping a platform, external tools and sites that interact with that platform often contain valuable implementation hints. Even if you don’t use their exact code, they can reveal API structures and access patterns.

Identifying the API Endpoints

The investigation revealed that Kick’s clip data could be accessed through an API endpoint with a structure like: api/v2/clips/[clip-id]/play. Making a GET request to this endpoint returns the necessary data to access the video.

However, there was an important complication: the API appeared to be protected by Cloudflare, which presents challenges for standard HTTP request libraries.

Overcoming Cloudflare Protection

When attempting to access the API using standard fetch requests, the response was a 403 error with Cloudflare challenge elements. This is where specialized tools become essential.

The ‘got-scraping’ package proved invaluable in this scenario. Unlike standard HTTP clients, got-scraping can navigate Cloudflare protection without additional configuration. A simple request using this package successfully retrieved the JSON data needed to access the clip.

Implementation Approach

The final implementation was remarkably straightforward:

1. Identify the clip ID from the URL
2. Use got-scraping to make a request to the API endpoint
3. Parse the returned JSON to extract the video URL
4. Download the video content from that URL

This approach works without needing browser automation or complex workarounds, making it efficient and maintainable.

Key Takeaways

When approaching scraping tasks, remember these important points:

• Look beyond the target site for implementation hints
• Check for specialized tools like browser-specific downloaders that might reveal API structures
• Use specialized packages like got-scraping when dealing with protected resources
• Examine network requests to identify potential API endpoints

By combining these techniques, even platforms with some level of protection can often be scraped efficiently and reliably.