Introduction

When DSH developers handle social media links (such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin), direct requests to those links often return an HTML shell or a download prompt. The dsh-linkdigest plugin uses a remote LinkDigest service to parse social media links into text, including transcription, on-screen text recognition, and image description, for direct consumption by agents.

Core Features

  • Transcription: Converts a video’s audio to text.
  • On-screen text recognition: Recognizes text in video frames.
  • Image description: Describes the content of images.
  • Subtitle and metadata extraction: Retrieves video subtitles and publisher information.
  • Viral video breakdown: Analyzes the hook in the first few seconds, structure, title formula, cover copy, call to action, and audience template.
  • Translation: Supports translating content.
  • Supported platforms: Xiaohongshu, Douyin, TikTok, YouTube, X, and web pages.

Installation and Activation

Before using it, obtain an API key and configure the LinkDigest remote endpoint. DSH bridges to this service through the built-in @deepseek-ai/dsh-mcp-client.

1、Set the environment variable with the API key after obtaining it:

export LINKDIGEST_API_KEY=ld_live_...

2、Configure the MCP endpoint (using Cursor as an example; DSH can be configured similarly in its internal MCP client):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "linkdigest": {
      "url": "https://linkdigest.dev/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ld_live_..." }
    }
  }
}

Typical Usage

The tool automatically recognizes social media links and invokes the parsing feature. You can also use it directly via the command line or the Python SDK.

Command-line example:

linkdigest "https://v.douyin.com/xxxx/" --breakdown

Python SDK example:

from linkdigest import LinkDigest

d = LinkDigest().digest("https://xhslink.com/o/xxxx", translate_to="en")
print(d.title, d.credits, d.cached)
print(d.markdown)

Use Cases and Notes

  • Use cases: Reading social media posts that cannot be directly scraped, analyzing the structure of viral videos, extracting video subtitles, or translating social media content.
  • Platform support limitations: Bilibili is not supported; Instagram is unverified; Facebook is not supported. The plugin does not support accessing Bilibili via a proxy.
  • Billing and performance: New users receive 10 free credits. Videos are billed by the number of minutes played once playback starts. Cached links return in about 1 second.
  • Data security: Media files are deleted before the response is returned; the server does not store or provide media content.
  • Transcription technology: Uses Qwen3-ASR for speech transcription and is more accurate than Whisper-large-v3-turbo for Chinese recognition.