Today I wanted to bring to light a new development and update to the last post regarding Streamlink.
General Updates
You can now subscribe to these blogs by clicking the subscribe link in the sidebar. You’ll get a fancy pants email notification whenever a new blog post comes out! I’m actually not quite sure why I didn’t do this in the first place, but better late than never. Also rest assured, your email is only used for this purpose only; you won’t get any annoying spam. I hate that crap too.
Also congratulations to generaldao for winning the Persona 4 Giveaway that was hosted this month. The giveaway implementation was a little shaky, and I definitely learned quite a bit from it for the next time we do one. A lot of it has to do with the limitations of Iris.EXE, but some of it also had to do with ticket costs and limits. Its hard to balance these things out where you, the loyal viewer, is aptly rewarded, but still give a chance for new members of the community to win as well.
There is also a new zenny reward in the shop for those interested. Its a nice simple one mostly for fun that Discord members might appreciate. Make sure you check that out here.
In Discord I had to limit the .timely command usage solely to the #botspam channel, since a CERTAIN person did not want to conform to the rules. However it had a nice side effect where I was able to make it so upon using other commands in other channels, the command syntax is automatically deleted in order to reduce spam and clutter.
Streamlink Update
I also wanted to bring to light a small development for Streamlink. As you know, one of Streamlink’s main weaknesses is its inability to support Twitch’s low latency feature. However there has been some work done and a test plugin was created last month which brings this functionality to streamlink, albeit with some bugs. I have been using it with only minor issues during the past month. If you are the more adventurous type, you can try it out as well, although again I must remind you that this is a test plugin and it has some bugs. For the more technically inclined here’s a simple set of instructions in order to get this running.
First make sure you have the nightly build of streamlink installed. This won’t work with the latest release version. Find the nightly build here.
Since its a test plugin, we have to sideload it. (You don’t have to, but it’ll allow you to revert this easily if you wish).
- Navigate to streamlink’s %appdata% folder (Type %appdata% into the start menu).
- You should now be in “C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\streamlink” (Don’t worry if it doesn’t say “Admin” since that is user dependent, as long as the rest of the file path is correct)
- Navigate to the plugins folder inside. It probably doesn’t exist yet. Create one.
- You should now be in “C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\streamlink\plugins”
- Create a new notepad file and paste the code found here
- Save the file as twitch.py
- Make sure you have file extensions enabled in Windows, otherwise it will just save as twitch.py.txt. Just rename it if it does.
- Paste the file in the current location “C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\streamlink\plugins”
- If you ever want to revert streamlink back to normal, simply delete this file.
Don’t worry about that pycache folder you see here, that gets created automatically later on. Just put the twitch.py file here.
Now launch Streamlink Twitch GUI and navigate to Streaming settings. Find the option for HLS live edge and change the value to 1 and apply.
Now restart Streamlink GUI and launch a stream. You’ll know the plugin is working if you see this while the stream is launching.
I have to emphasize again that this is a test plugin. It does have some minor bugs. The main one I’ve encountered is where streamlink has a lower latency than even the Twitch player itself, and then it has to buffer in annoying intervals until the delay is long enough to stabilize. This issue tends to happen with affiliate and unpartnered streams though; its never happened when I view a partnered stream. It may have to do with the available quality options. Other than that though, for me it has worked wonderfully well and I am so glad to fully ditch the crappy Twitch website design.
If you want to read the github issue post where all of this information originated, you can find that here. Thanks to KazukiMutou for bringing it up in UBW. Let’s hope this is implemented officially in a future Streamlink update soon.