twimm

This is a Bash script that automates the process of finding and watching long Twitch broadcasts based on the desired language for language immersion. You can specify the language, resolution, game, and tags of the streamers you want to watch, and the script will parse the available videos from a custom API, save the information in a text file, and play random broadcasts using mpv.

Why I recommend Twitch broadcasts for language immersion

As you can see in the commit history, older versions of this script had an option to watch streams directly. However, the author of this script believes that it is a bad decision for several reasons:

• Twitch streams contain ads, and even if you watch them in mpv, you will still see an ad placeholder. If the streamer is popular, this placeholder may last for 2+ minutes, which can be disturbing.
• You cannot seek streams, but you can seek broadcasts. For example, if the streamer is silent (remember, we're doing language immersion).
• Finding a new stream takes a lot of time for both the script and the user. Watching broadcasts is faster.
• Overall, streams are not very useful for language immersion. However, if you NEED to watch a stream, it's better to use mpv with your favorite streamer or check out SafeTwitch instances to watch Twitch safely in a browser.

Requirements

To run this script, you need the following:

• bash
• curl
• jq
• awk
• xargs
• mpv
• A custom API instance that provides Twitch data. The default one is projectsegfau.lt, but you can change API URL by editing the instance variable in the script.

Usage

You can run the script with the following options:

• -l Language of the streamer (Default: Español)
• -r Resolution of the video (Default: 480p)
• -g Game name (Default: Just Chatting)
• -s Tags to find
• -w Watch videos
• -h Display this help and exit

No flag will parse streamers and add videos to the watch list with default values.

Examples

Get watchlist of current streamers with Argentina tag.

./twimm.sh -s 'Argentina'

Watch English broadcast of the Dota 2 game.

./twimm.sh -l English -r 1080p60 -g 'Dota 2' -w

How it works

The script does the following steps:

• It creates a directory $HOME/.local/share/twimm to store the files related to the script, such as tocheck, towatch, watched, and last_parsed.
• It uses the addedtags function to search for streamers that match the tags specified by the user (or the default language) using the API. It stores the usernames of the streamers in a temporary file streamerlist.
• It uses the parsingstreamers function to parse the streamers in the streamerlist file and check if they have the desired language tag in their stream. It uses the API to get the streamer's login and tags, and stores them in the favs file, along with the language.
• It uses the addtowatch function to add the videos of the streamers in the favs file to the watch list. It uses the comm command to compare the tocheck file and the last_parsed file, which stores the streamers and the timestamps of the last time they were parsed. It only parses the streamers that have not been parsed recently (within 3 days). It uses the API to get the videos of the streamers, and filters them by duration (more than 10000 seconds). It stores the video id, game, login, tags, and language in the towatch file.
• It uses the watch function to watch the videos in the towatch file. It randomly selects a video that matches the language, tags, and game specified by the user, and gets the link to the video from the API. It uses the mpv command to play the video, starting from 15 minutes. It removes the video from the towatch file and adds it to the watched file. It repeats this until there are no more videos to watch or the user exits the script.

Cron

You can add 0 * * * * /path/to/twimm.sh line into your crontab to update your towatch file every hour.