Livestreamer / Streamlink

Usage | Settings | Troubleshooting

Livestreamer is a commandline program that can be used to watch streams in a player like VLC Player. It has to be downloaded and installed separately from Chatty.

Note: Since Livestreamer doesn't appear to be developed anymore, there is an updated fork called Streamlink, which works the same way. If you want to use Streamlink with Chatty, simply change the Base command to streamlink (or, as with Livestreamer, put the whole path to the program if that is required in your case). Currently Streamlink appears to be using the same commandline interface, so everything should work as usual (after changing the Base command). If they do change the interface, changes in Chatty may be required.

Usage

You can open the Livestreamer dialog that Chatty provides via Extra - Livestreamer, where you can directly run Livestreamer and change some settings.

Each time you open a stream via the dialog or a context menu, a tab is added to the dialog where the output of the Livestreamer process is redirected to. If you open a stream with the same stream name and quality you already have open in a tab whose process isn't currently running, then that tab will be reused.

The tab of a stream is automatically closed when you close the Video Player opened by Livestreamer, if the dialog isn't currently open. Otherwise you have to close it yourself by using the Close-button on the top right, which turns into an End process-button as long as the process is still running. The Retry-button can be used to re-run the last command of that tab (for example when it couldn't find the stream, but you want to retry now because you know it's come online).

Settings

The settings can be changed in the Livestreamer dialog.

Enable context menu entry

Adds a Livestreamer submenu to all context menus that can be used to open streams (for example right-click on channel, username or Live Streams dialog).

Show dialog when opening stream

Auto-opens the Livestreamer Dialog when you open a stream out of a context menu.

Auto close dialog when starting player

Auto-closes the Livestreamer Dialog when the text Starting player comes up in the log.

Context menu qualities

You can customize which quality options appear in the context menu. The options you enter here are directly given as a parameter to Livestreamer, except Select which tells Chatty you want to select a quality in the dialog.

Separate qualities by space or comma, add a | (vertical bar) to add a separator to the menu.

Enclose qualities in brackets { } if you need to add commas, for example if you want to specify a list of fallback qualities.

Optionally add a display name for a group of qualities by separating it with a colon (:).

Examples:

• Best, High, Worst | Select
• Source High Medium Low Mobile | Select
• Best, {720p,720p60}, Select, {Audio,audio_only}
• {High Quality:1080p60,1080p,720p60,720p} {Low Quality:360p,240p}

Base command (Livestreamer path and parameters)

This must contain the Livestreamer executable, including any commandline options that you always want to be included when running Livestreamer out of Chatty.

The URL and quality are automatically appended to this when running Livestreamer, so the overall command that is executed is build like this: <Base command> <url> <quality>.

You can use the variables $stream, $url and $quality in this setting (see Examples).

The default is just livestreamer, which is sufficient if Livestreamer is correctly included in the systems PATH variable, but you may also specify the full path.

Remember to surround the path or any parameters with quotes if they contain spaces, so the commandline knows they belong together.

Examples:

• "C:\My Programs\Livestreamer\livestreamer.exe"
  (specify full path to the Livestreamer executable)
• "C:\My Programs\Livestreamer\livestreamer.exe" --player "C:\Program Files\MPC-HC\mpc-hc64.exe"
  (specify full path to Livestreamer and use a different player)
• /usr/local/bin/livestreamer
  (this might work on Linux/Mac if it can't find Livestreamer without the full path)
• livestreamer -p "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe --meta-title $stream/$quality"
  (change VLC Player window title to something more descriptive)

Use Authorization (Twitch Oauth Token)

Tell Livestreamer to authenticate at Twitch with your Chatty access token.

Enabling this may help if you get an error when running Livestreamer (Bad Request).

This is necessary for sub-only streams.

Troubleshooting

Bad Request

Recently Twitch changed their API to require a Client ID being supplied, which Livestreamer doesn't do by default, so you may get a Bad Request error. You can fix this either by:

• Enabling the Use Authorization setting to authenticate with Twitch, which makes the Twitch API derive the Client ID from the access token.
• Adding a Client ID to the Base command, for eaxmple to add Livestreamer's Client ID:
  livestreamer --http-header Client-ID=ewvlchtxgqq88ru9gmfp1gmyt6h2b93

If you're using Streamlink this shouldn't be an issue for you since it has been updated accordingly.

Can't run Livestreamer

If you get an error like Error: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "<...>": CreateProcess error=2 [..], then Chatty probably can't find Livestreamer on your system.

To solve this, first make sure that you actually have Livestreamer installed. You need to install it on you own, it does not come bundled with Chatty. If you are sure it is installed (and you maybe can run it from the commandline just fine), you may have to tell Chatty the full path to the Livestreamer executable for it to work by entering it in the Base command field. See the Settings section above for examples and help on that.