Dual Livestream Chat in Terminal

Why?

I often watch livestreams while programming, and using the PiP function in Arc Browser I can have both the video and the chat of a livestream in a tmux pane.

Docs

This is a NodeJS app to get chat messages from two livestreams on Youtube and Twitch, and combining them into a terminal window. Youtube messages are color coded in red, while Twitch is colored to blue.

Youtube messages are controlled with an interval in the configuration file so that it stays within the free tier limit of the YoutTube API (10.000 credits in a 24 hour span). Twitch messages are streamed in real-time and has no limit or restrictions.

Caching (Youtube)

The YouTube api returns a chat object with 200 messages and there has to be made a individual request on each message_id to find the channel name for the user who sent the message.

User ids and channel names are cached in the channelCache.json file. To avoid making unnecessary API calls, this file will be checked before every request for a channel name when new messages comes in.

Interval (Youtube)

For each fetch, it compares the previously fetched messages with the new ones, and only prints the new ones with an set interval of 500ms per message. (This interval might be moved to setup.json at a later date)

The standard fetch interval for YouTube messages is 20000ms. If it is already printing from a previously fetched batch of messages, it will not run a new fetch before printing is complete, and a new cycle of the fetch interval has passed.

Usage

After configuring the setup.json file, you can run the app as follows:

1. Install the node_modules

npm install

2. Run the app

node index.js

Setup

1. Fill in the Twitch channel name(s) in the channels array.

2. Fill in the YouTube API key in the api_key field.
   This is your API key from the Google API console, remember to enable YouTube API.

3. Fill in the YouTube LiveChatID in the live_chat_id field.
   node youtube-chat/livestreamid.js --id [livestreamid]
   The livesteamid is the ID that can be found at the end of the url of a YouTube livestream

4. Change the interval in the interval field if needed.

{
  "twitch": {
    "channels": [""]
  },
  "youtube": {
    "api_key": "",
    "live_chat_id": "",
    "interval": 20000
  }
}