Question / Help Pull Info From Twitch To Text File (Raid/Host Etc)

[y0himba]

Hello! Let me start by stating that I am old, I am new to streaming, and I have been teaching myself for 2 days, almost non-stop on how to use OBS and create everything myself, trying to stay away from third party websites. I am not a point and click person. Just a preference I like to do everything I can locally, on my PC, myself. Please be gentle with me.

What I am looking for is a way to set up an alert that uses a local source, such as Text (GDI+) that is fired by en event such as a raid. I think a way to do this would be to read the information from a text file that is updated from Twitch itself, possibly using the API. (Is that correct, API?) So when, for example, a raid happens, the raider and number in the raiding party are written to a text file which then is read by the alert, which was fired by the event itself.

As I said, I am SO very new to this, and I am most likely going about it all wrong. I am a semi-retired truck driver and not the most intelligent of humans, so alternative methods for achieving this are most welcome. The end result being using local sources as much as possible. For example, local media files, local text files, local HTML/CSS/JS etc. files. I have tried doing what I want through Streamelements, however unless I can learn one of the web languages very quickly, the options are very limited. I want it to be simple, clean and text based if possible, and I would prefer a tutorial, not to have someone just do it for me. I want to learn to do it myself.

Now, I am off to try and wrap my head around web coding and languages. My poor brain. I didn't even graduate high school for God's sake!

 

[FerretBomb]

Welcome!
The easiest way to do this would be to use an alert provider like Streamlabs (the website, not their derivative version of OBS), StreamElements (again, the website, not their plugin OBS.Live), or Muxy to set up your alert responses/text/sounds/etc. To customize them, there are a number of third-party sites like Nerd or Die that offer free and paid packages of pre-made custom alerts that are dead simple to set up.

The second-easiest would be to use a pre-made utility like StreamLabels, which pulls down information from Twitch and/or Streamlabs through the API, and writes it out to text files. Normally this is not used for alerts, but overlay elements that are constantly on-screen, showing things like who your newest subscriber or follower is, how many followers/subs you have, your top tip-giver for the date-range, stuff like that.

OBS can't interact with the Twitch API directly, and provides no internal framework for creating alerts or listing this information directly (why the sites and Streamlabels program exist). If you want to do this locally it IS possible, but requires quite a bit of advanced geekery to essentially replicate what Streamlabs/StreamElements/Muxy are doing, just with a locally-run webserver.

If you want the short and sweet?
Use Streamlabs/StreamElements/Muxy. It's easy. I stream professionally and use them. Doing it local really isn't worth the headache unless you're already WELL versed in web development and have a wild hair. Yeah, it'll malfunction now and then (a lot less now, than then). Yeah, the site might disappear sometime in the next ten years. But unless you really, really like the idea of spending weeks or probably months learning an entire skillset that you may use once? Only to then get to deal with the BS of updating everything the next time Twitch updates and completely mangles their API to something new. It wasn't worth the hours to me, brother.

 

[y0himba]

I have a web host that I can run things from if that helps. I just set up a Now Playing web source that was running remotely on another person's server, and instead of using his resources, it is now running on mine, using my paid for resources and my API calls. I am a huge believer of trying to do things for myself, rather than getting them for free or just pushing a button without knowing how it works.

The problem with Streamlabs and Streamelements is the lack of customization. Unless I know HTML or CSS, I cannot customize the widget how I want it to look. I would rather create the webm video on my machine, use it as a media source and superimpose text on it if I could. The stumbling block s the real time data flow. There are services and programs that pull static stats from Twitch to a text file and using that to scroll or display static info on the screen is easy. Real time updates, not so much.

I guess it's time to start looking for tutorials on how to customize the available services then. Just my opinion, but I think it stifles creativity to have real time information on our (your) stream locked up for use by only services, and it should be easier to do things oneself.

 

[sandy951]

Thanks for this information. I've found which explain how to raid on twitch. Hope it helps you in understanding raids better.