Twitch integration via EventSub

[nuernbergerA]

Streaming on Twitch is totally different concept than streaming via YouTube.

On YouTube you can schedule a single stream with a starting time.
Twitch instead only allows you to add a weekly schedule due to its nature, it's like a TV show.

The only beneficial way to integrate Twitch for me would be via EventSub.

Workflow:

• Register a twitch streamer
• "Subscribe" channel via API (registers a webhook that gets pinged if the channel is live)
• Decide if we show the stream or not (some tag must be present or something else)

I have already a working API - will create a draft PR

[christophrumpel]

Thanks @nuernbergerA,

we discussed this already a bit in #11.
I see currently two issues:

1. we have to subscribe to all streams of a channel (tag can help from the streamer view, but we cannot check the stream if it is relevant from the app view)
2. when we have streams from twitch we need to handle two platforms, like what if a stream is streamed on both platforms, etc.

I don't see them as big issues but they need to be handled and discussed too. I definitely want to support Twitch too somehow.

[christophrumpel]

@nuernbergerA, @danielhe4rt mentioned these new API endpoints: https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/announcing-api-endpoints-for-twitch-channel-stream-schedules/32137

This will make it now much easier. Challenges I still see:

• How do we know the stream is about Laravel? Is there a way to tag streams on Twitch with Laravel?
• Check if a stream is on both YouTube and Twitch (like mines). Wee need to compare given streams and merge them if they are the same streams, but on different channels

[austenc]

Please forgive me if I'm out of the loop on how this app works, but another option may be to allow submission individual streams with a generic URL instead of trying to integrate with twitch directly.

I'm going to stream on Twitch often (nearly always Laravel), but would be happy to manually submit a few "bigger" stream events as I plan them.

[christophrumpel]

Hey, thanks for getting in touch @austenc. What kind of "generic URL" are you thinking of?

Currently, we are using YouTube stream ids for submission. Through these ids we are able to collect all the important stream info like name, date, image, etc.

[austenc]

Ah, yeah, I admittedly (sorry!) didn't look at the source to see how that was happening.

Although it works great for Youtube, it may be difficult to incorporate for Twitch given that nothing is really "scheduled". I see you posted about the stream schedule API that Twitch has now... problem is, what if you miss a stream?

Anyway, I was thinking of a form that would allow you to fill out all those fields manually. I thought that's how it was working already, but I assumed wrong! Totally understand if supporting something like that isn't something you want to do as a maintainer, though. Thanks!

[aarondfrancis]

I'd be totally fine to just manually add my streams vs having a full on integration with Twitch! Is that doable?

[skylerkatz]

If you consider a stream on twitch to be never ending, the segment id is a unique identifier for a particular start and end time. For a scheduled stream on twitch it would have a start and end time, but if you just "go live" it has a start but no end time.

Given a channel name, and a start time, we can find the segment id of a pre-scheduled stream.

[christophrumpel]

ah ok, interesting approach. Ok, let's say the streamer gives us enough information to make a call to his schedule and find the right "segement"/stream. (from here? https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/api/reference/#get-channel-stream-schedule)

I guess we then have enough info about the segment to put in on Larastreamers. How would we check then if this segment is live?
Over the streamer's channel here? https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/api/reference#get-streams

[skylerkatz]

If you are trying to make sure that the segment is actually live then I think we would want to subscribe to the stream.online event for the user. We can do things like subscribe to the event from the time the stream is submitted to larastreamers until the date passes, or just continue to be subscribed but ignore webhooks when the stream was not scheduled in larastreamers.

[christophrumpel]

Started looking into this a bit more, @skylerkatz do I understand this correctly that I can only subscribe to if a streamer is online and not if a stream/segment is online?

[skylerkatz]

That is correct.

[christophrumpel]

Alright, I tried to sum up the flows of how working with Twitch streams could work. What do you think?

The scenario where we store a whole twitch channel:

1. We add channel name to backend-form
2. We use the Twitch users endpoint with the login channel name to get the broadcaster id of the channel
3. We use the Twitch schedule endpoint to get the schedule of a channel with the broadcaster id
4. We store all the schedule segments
5. We use the Twitch eventsub/subscriptions endpoint to set up a subscription to the stream.online and stream.offline event for the current broadcaster
6. When we receive stream.online event, we check if we have this stream, if not we add it and set it to live, if yes, we set the given stream to live
7. When we receive the stream.offline event, we check if we have this stream, if yes, we set the stream to finished
8. Regularly check the schedule of the broadcaster for new streams or updates

The scenario where the user can submit a twitch stream:

1. User provides channel name and stream title
2. We use the Twitch users endpoint with the login channel name to get the broadcaster id of the channel
3. We use the Twitch schedule endpoint to get the schedule of a channel with the broadcaster id
4. We look through the segments to find the right one with the correct name
5. We store the segment as stream
6. We use the Twitch eventsub/subscriptions endpoint to set up a subscription to the stream.online and stream.offline event for the current broadcaster
7. When we receive stream.online, we check if we have this stream, if not we skip it, if yes, set this stream to live
8. When we receive the stream.offline event, we check if we have this stream, if not we skip it, if yes, we set the stream to finished and cancel the subscription through the eventsub/subscriptions endpoint
9. Regularly check the schedule of the broadcaster to see if given streams have changed, if yes, update them

[skylerkatz]

Not sure if it makes sense for an initial implementation, but if you submit your whole channel it might be nice to say "subscribe to all segments on my channel with a tag of X" where X is a form field they fill out. If blank, subscribe to everything. If filled, skip segments that don't include X.

[christophrumpel]

And "x" would be something in the name? Or some kind of tag?

[skylerkatz]

yeah, X would be a tag that the user enters when subscribing their channel.

For example,

#laravel or #public whatever the user chooses.

[christophrumpel]

@skylerkatz I just noticed (during stream) that for the online / offline events, we don't get any info about the "stream/segment", this is only about the channel. So I have no way to connect online to a specific stored stream, I can just guess it is the nearest one... at least it seems so after checking the API again. Any idea?

[christophrumpel]

I did some more research, and then talked on the Twitch forum about it: https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/how-to-know-which-stream-segment-is-live/41800/7

It seems it is almost impossible to tie an twitch scheduled stream, to when a channel is live. In the Twitch world there is no real connection between a channel which is live and a scheduled stream. And there is NO "stream that is live". It's always a channel that is live.

[skylerkatz]

Sorry I did not respond yesterday. The only recommendation would be to match the current channel title with the segment title you expect.

Another option is to tell the person syncing their schedule that they need to include a #larastream tag on segments that they want to be on the site