coder39248583
commented
3 years ago @zylopr It doesn't even have to be a spare android phone. It can be your primary one, if you have one. On the android phone you can install "Macdroid" free version (alternatively, "Automate" free version also works, as does "Tasker," but that one costs money). Any of those apps can be configured to detect Instagram notifications and, in response, trigger custom HTTP get requests to a web server running on your PC -- passing along the notification text. Your server can parse the notification text to see if it is a live video, and who the user is, and make the appropriate call to PyInstaLive. This would of course require you to install a web server on your computer. There might be easier ways but they don't come immediately to mind. A good old fashioned apache/php setup would work. For Windows there are bundled softwares like XAMPP or MAMP that can set this up for you.
For example:
In the Macdroid app, on your android, you would create a new macro (consisting of a trigger and an action). Set the trigger to "Notification received" from Instagram App (you can optionally set a text filter in this step, but it might be easier for your web server to do it.)
For the action choose "HTTP GET" and set the URL to https://your.server.ip.address:port/whatever.php?title=[not_title]&text=[notification]&textlines=[not_text_lines]&tickertext=[not_ticker]
"not_title" is short for notification title, etc.. You might not need all those variables, but Instagram might change which ones serve the "Bob is starting a live video" or "Bob is going live now with Sarah" texts. Of course you would replace parts of the address to match your server address, but the variables should be typed just like they appear, with brackets.
Make sure to check the boxes "url encode parameters" and "http get (no web browser)". You can optionally have it check for an http response, but you don't have to worry about that if you don't want to.
Then, in your server's PHP page (or whatever other server language is most familiar to you) you would regex check the $_GET["text"], $_GET["textlines"], etc, variables, for a pattern matching the usual live notification, for example on a windows server you could do something like this:
$text = urldecode($_GET["text"]);
// e.g. "Zylopr: Bob started a live video"
// e.g. "Zylopr: Bob is going live with...."
if(preg_match('/\((.+)\): (.+) started a live video/U', $text, $matches) ||
preg_match('/\((.+)\): (.+) is going live/U', $text, $matches))
{
$yourAccountName = $matches[1]; // if you have multiple accounts
$yourPassword = "yourpassforthataccount";
$theirAccountName = $matches[2];
// starts pyinstalive in a visible window on your PC and immediately
// returns so we don't leave macdroid hanging
pclose(popen("start \"customwindowtitle\" cmd /C pyinstalive -u $yourAccountName -p $yourPassword -d $theirAccountName" ,"r"));
}This should get you started. Once you achieve basic functionality you can flesh out your program to do more, like deal with conflicting lives (I don't know if pyinstalive can run multiple instances, and even if it could it might look suspicious if you ran simultaneous downloads. You can create a list of users sorted by priority, and in the case of a conflict kill an existing download for a lower priority user. You can whip something up that sends a kill command like ctrl-c keystroke to any windows with the "customwindowtitle" you created, or something.
Let me know how it goes. Good luck.
zylopr
cykac04
Hi there,
Just wondering if anyone has figured out a way to monitor for Lives without getting the 'suspicious activity' and subsequent 'change your password' prompts from Instagram?
If not, I've thought of a potential workaround, but I'm not sure how to implement it exactly. Basically, you have a spare Android phone (or PC running Bluestacks) with the Instagram app installed, then when a live notification comes in from the Instagram app, an app forwards that notification on to the PC where it'll trigger PyInstaLive to run. Anyone have any ideas how to make this work?