twitch-hls-client

twitch-hls-client is a minimal command line client for watching/recording Twitch streams

Features

• Playback of low latency and normal latency streams
• Ad blocking with playlist proxies or with a turbo/subscriber token
• Generally lower latency than the Twitch web player
• Tiny (at most uses 3-4MB of memory)

Usage

Watching

Provide a player to output the stream to with -p, a channel to watch, and a stream quality.

Example:

$ twitch-hls-client -p mpv twitchchannel best
Fetching playlist for channel twitchchannel
Low latency streaming
Opening player: mpv -
 (+) Video --vid=1 (h264)
 (+) Audio --aid=1 (aac)
Using hardware decoding (vaapi).
VO: [gpu] 1920x1080 vaapi[nv12]
AO: [pipewire] 48000Hz stereo 2ch floatp
AV: 03:57:23 / 03:57:23 (100%) A-V:  0.000 Cache: 0.7s/482KB

Recording

Provide a file path to output the stream to with -r, a channel to watch, and a stream quality.

Example:

$ twitch-hls-client -r recording twitchchannel best
Fetching playlist for channel twitchchannel
Low latency streaming
Recording to: recording

You can also use -p and -r at the same time.
That is the bare minimum, but there are many more options which can be viewed here or by passing --help.

Ad blocking playlist proxies

These servers can be used to block ads with -s. They work by requesting the master playlist from a country where Twitch doesn't serve ads:

TTV-LOL-PRO v1 servers:

• https://lb-eu.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (Europe)
• https://lb-eu2.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (Europe 2)
• https://lb-eu4.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (Europe 4)
• https://lb-eu5.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (Europe 5)
• https://lb-na.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (NA)
• https://lb-as.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (Asia)
• https://lb-sa.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel] (SA)

luminous-ttv servers:

• https://eu.luminous.dev/live/[channel] (Europe)
• https://eu2.luminous.dev/live/[channel] (Europe 2)
• https://as.luminous.dev/live/[channel] (Asia)

Using your turbo/subscriber token

With --auth-token you can set an OAuth token to be used when fetching the master playlist. Twitch won't serve ads if the Twitch account associated with the OAuth token is subscribed to turbo or the specific channel you're watching.

To find your token, navigate to the Twitch website in a browser and open your browser's devtools (press F12). Click the Application (Chrome) or Storage (Firefox) tab and find https://www.twitch.tv under Cookies on the left. Your token is the string of characters beside the cookie named auth-token.

Config file

Almost every option can also be set via config file. Example config file with all possible values set (values are made up):

# This is a comment
player=../mpv/mpv
player-args=- --profile=low-latency
record=./recording
servers=https://eu.luminous.dev/live/[channel],https://lb-eu.cdn-perfprod.com/live/[channel]
debug=true
quiet=true
passthrough=false
print-streams=false
overwrite=false
no-low-latency=false
no-kill=false
force-https=true
force-ipv4=false
client-id=0123456789abcdef
auth-token=0123456789abcdef
never-proxy=channel1,channel2,channel3
codecs=av1,h265,h264
user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:122.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0
http-retries=3
http-timeout=10
quality=720p

Depending on your platform this will look for the config file at the following locations (can be overridden with -c):

Platform	Default location
Linux & BSD	${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-${HOME}/.config}/twitch-hls-client/config
Windows	%APPDATA%\twitch-hls-client\config
MacOS	${HOME}/Library/Application Support/twitch-hls-client/config
Other	./twitch-hls-client/config

Installing

There are standalone binaries built by GitHub for Linux and Windows here.

Alternatively, you can build it yourself by installing the Rust toolchain and then running:

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/2bc4/twitch-hls-client.git

NixOS

Flake Package

# flake.nix

{
  inputs.twitch-hls-client.url = "github:2bc4/twitch-hls-client";
  # ...

  outputs = {nixpkgs, ...} @ inputs: {
    nixosConfigurations.HOSTNAME = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      specialArgs = { inherit inputs; }; # this is the important part
      modules = [
        ./configuration.nix
      ];
    };
  } 
}

# configuration.nix

{inputs, pkgs, ...}: {
  programs.twitch-hls-client = {
    enable = true;
    package = inputs.twitch-hls-client.packages.${pkgs.system}.default;
  };
}

Flake Home-Manager

# twitch-hls-client.nix
{
  programs.twitch-hls-client = {
    enable = true;
    # ...

    # This is a example to use -c config file every time
    systemd.user.services.twitch-hls-client = {
      Unit = {
        Description = "Twitch HLS Client Service";
      };

      Service = {
        Type = "simple";
        ExecStart = "twitch-hls-client -c ${config.xdg.configHome}/twitch-hls-client/config";
        Restart = "always";
      };

      Install = {
        WantedBy = ["default.target"];
      };
    };
  };
}

Optional build time features

• colors - Enable terminal colors (enabled by default)
• debug-logging - Enable debug logging support

Reducing player latency with mpv

If your internet connection is fast enough to handle it, adding these values to your config will reduce latency by ~1-2 seconds:

player-args=- --profile=low-latency --no-cache

License

Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3, see LICENSE for more information.