Twitch Livestream Downloading

Question

Hi guys im not been able to find a solution to this issue and wonder if you can help me. Im looking for a tool that will sit in the background and watch a twitch stream URL and when the live broadcast starts it will download to my local machine. your help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

As far as the downloading part of your question is concerned you can use livestreamer, e.g.:

livestreamer <livestream-url> best -o vod.mp4

For installation instructions check out this answer by @henry.

---

It actually shouldn't be too difficult to monitor stream activity via the Twitch API. For instance, you could perform a simple curl request piped to grep to identify if the stream is offline or if there's another type of error:

curl -s  https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/streams/totalbiscuit | grep '"stream":null'

This will return as true if no stream is running at the moment.

With that in mind you could design a simple loop that would check for active streams every few minutes, e.g.:

#!/bin/bash

Channel="totalbiscuit"

while sleep 60; do
  if ! curl -s "https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/streams/$Channel" | grep -q '"stream":null'; then
    echo "$Channel is live. Downloading stream..."
    livestreamer "http://www.twitch.tv/$Channel" best -o "${Channel}_livestream.mp4"
  else
    echo "$Channel is offline"
  fi
done

Or, slightly more complex and with more sanity checks:

#!/bin/bash

# Simple Twitch Poller
# Author: Glutanimate
# License: GPL v3
# Dependencies: livestreamer
# 
# Description: Polls twitch channel status and downloads stream if user is online

Usage="$0 <space-separated list of twitch channels>"

Channels=($@)

Interval="60" # polling interval in seconds

if [[ -z "$Channels" ]]; then
  echo "Error: No channels provided"
  echo "Usage: $Usage"
  exit 1
fi

while true; do
  for i in ${Channels[@]}; do
    StreamData="$(curl -s  "https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/streams/$i")"
    if echo "$StreamData" | grep -q '"status":404'; then # 404 Error
      echo "Error: $i does not exist."
      break 2
    elif echo "$StreamData" | grep -q '"stream":null'; then # Channel offline
      echo "$i is offline."
    else # Channel online
      echo "$i is live. Downloading stream..."
      livestreamer "http://www.twitch.tv/$i" best -o "$(date +"${i}_TwitchVOD_%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S.mp4")"
    fi
  done
  sleep "$Interval"
done

To try this script out, copy and paste the codeblock above into a new empty text file, save it as twitch_poller.sh or something similar and make it executable via the Properties menu of your file manager (Right click → Properties → Permissions → Allow executing file as program).

Make sure you have livestreamer installed, then run the script from a terminal while providing the twitch channels you want to monitor, e.g.:

$ './twitch_poller.sh' totalbiscuit TSM_Dyrus
totalbiscuit is offline.
TSM_Dyrus is live. Downloading stream...
[cli][info] Found matching plugin twitch for URL http://www.twitch.tv/TSM_Dyrus
[cli][info] Available streams: audio, high, low, medium, mobile (worst), source (best)
[cli][info] Opening stream: source (hls)
[download][..D_2014-11-07_001503.mp4] Written 3.1 MB (6s @ 460.6 KB/s)

You can adjust the polling interval by setting the Interval variable in the script.