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henryperson / twitchmultivod

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[Feature Request] VOD Chat Support #8

Open ellieaii opened 3 years ago

ellieaii commented 3 years ago

I'd really like a feature similar to multistre.am where you can open each VOD's chat on the side of the website. I'm just not entirely sure if this is possible since it seems like twitchmultivod relies on twitch embeds.

Regardless, thank you so much for creating this tool, it is incredibly useful! I appreciate it a lot!

henryperson commented 3 years ago

I haven't spent much time on this since twitch's API doesn't (easily) expose chat for VODs. But some people have told me about sites that manage to get it anyway. I can look into it a bit and report back, I agree it would be a pretty cool feature to have

ellieaii commented 3 years ago

Ah, thank you so much! I'd really appreciate a feature like that!

Out of curiosity, which sites are you referring to when you mentioned that some sites were able to manage to use a VOD chat feature?

henryperson commented 3 years ago

The one I know if is this project. Should have said projects instead of sites because I don't know of any sites that manage to get VOD chat.

I looked through that project's code a bit and it looks like twitch does indeed expose chat through their API. So I believe it's possible to run a request (or more likely a series of them) and get the whole chat history from a VOD. However, they don't expose it through an embed like the VOD itself, which makes showing chat equivalent to re-creating the chat UI given a list of messages, which I expect to be a difficult endeavor. I can't just put up an appropriately sized box and then have twitch handle the rest for me, I'd need to handle showing messages at the right time even when VODs skip, handle showing badges and emotes, and more.

It seems doable, but more time intensive than I can take on for what's basically a weekend project. That said, I'll keep thinking about it and googling some more to see if I'm missing anything obvious. If you know of any sites that display chat for VODs that would be pretty useful to know of too (and that goes for anyone who happens to read this issue). Otherwise I'll have to wait until twitch expands their VOD embed to include embedding chat

ellieaii commented 3 years ago

Got it, thank you so much for letting me know!

A similar project that I've seen which is able to utilize a Twitch VOD chat is this project called Twitch Downloader. This project however doesn't rely on a website, but relies on a program that essentially recreates the Twitch VOD chat through ffmpeg to make it into a video. I'm not exactly sure how much you're able to gather and find out after looking into this project since it seems like a very different approach to what you're looking for, but hopefully it'll put you into the right direction by studying the project's code.

Thanks again for looking into this, I really appreciate your dedication to creating this website/tool. You're amazing!

ellieaii commented 3 years ago

Oh, I completely forgot to mention, there is another project that I have looked into before, however once again, I'm not entirely sure how helpful this is to your project, but hopefully you'll get some use looking into this old project. It's called TwitchChatReplay. The project is quite old at this point, but hopefully it'll still be relevant on possibly helping you to create this feature!

henryperson commented 3 years ago

Thanks for the links. Looking closer at these projects, they're doing essentially what I thought was necessary (re-creating the chat UI given a list of messages), though they're doing it for video rendering rather than in browser. They're cool projects, but unfortunately I can't repurpose their technology for this use case. I'm sadly going to have to wait until Twitch releases a VOD chat embed or get a free couple weeks to do it myself. Not out of the question, but not easy to find the time.

If it does happen you'll be the first to know though!