Streamlink: A Better Way
It’s quite soon for another blog post, but I wanted to bring to light a fabulous set of software I use to watch Twitch. Its called Streamlink.
Streamlink is a command-line utility that extracts streams from various services and pipes them into a video player of your choice. In layman terms, it can essentially pull livestreams from twitch and display them in VLC, Windows Media Player, or whatever. This offers several advantages over watching on the main site:
- You can watch the stream in whatever player you desire, and customize the experience to your liking.
- Having it display in a clean video player rather than a browser window with clutter uses a much smaller memory footprint, being easier on your machine.
- Because you are pulling only the livestream directly into your player, you don’t have to deal with ads.
These days, you never know when twitch will scratch their butt and decide to ruin the player, or break some component that month. You can easily take control of that with Streamlink.
However, streamlink does have some cons, a main disadvantage being in that it is a command-line utility. This means there is no GUI you can easily use it with; everything has to be done through a terminal, like the command line in Windows. This is a bit inconvenient. Hence the second fabulous piece of software: Streamlink Twitch GUI.
Streamlink Twitch GUI does what it says on the tin: it provides a nice GUI for you to be able to use Streamlink from. This in combination with streamlink offers a far more superior way to enjoy Twitch than the default experience.
The GUI comes with all the standard necessary features to enjoy twitch, including a subscription page, follow page, etc. You can also further customize it by adding filters, which can hide certain languages or streams, and even hide reruns entirely! Notice how some of the streams in the above image are dimmed? Its the filters at work. You are even able to browse streams by directory, and even view their channel page and details. It is truly a complete twitch experience, with none of the baggage.
To complete the entire Twitch GUI experience, you need chat. That is accomplished with Chatty.
Chatty simply displays Twitch chat, albeit with a few extra options, including color customization and a nice emote menu that you can pull up with a hotkey, similar to FrankerFaceZ. The real value in this program is we can hook this in with Streamlink Twitch GUI in the settings, and have it automatically open Chatty with the stream chat every time you launch a stream inside of the program, hence completing the full experience.
All this being said, this arrangement isn’t perfect. Streamlink still does suffer from one big disadvantage; it only sends streams at the normal latency, and does not support low latency. While it has been stated that this feature is in the works, there is no ETA for it at this time. It is up to you whether that ruins the experience for you. Regardless, this is how I have mostly watched Twitch for a long time, and I have no intention of going back soon.
Housekeeping
- The stream feedback survey has been re-enabled and can be accessed through the menu.
- There is now a command list for Iris.EXE which you can access through the menu here.
- There is now a command list for Roll.EXE which you can access through the menu here.
- Added a new experimental reward in the Zenny Shop, Ultimate Thanks.
- Added a stream alert for raids.
- Redesigned all the channel’s panels with more up to date, simplified designs.
- Iris.EXE’s data has been pruned a bit, with old commands and currency data being deleted.