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Archiving Livestreams

This guide covers how to record livestreams as they are occurring. This is useful for streams that will not be archived later.

Table of Contents

  1. Recording Regular Streams
  2. Recording Members Only Streams
  3. Post Processing
  4. FAQ

Recording Regular Streams

These instructions are for recording publicly available streams using Streamlink. Youtube-dl can record livestreams as well but Streamlink offers a better user experience for this scenario (it is common for people to corrupt their livestream recordings with youtube-dl). The following steps will record a stream while playing the stream through VLC. Instructions for using alternative media players are provided under Advanced Scenarios.

tl;dr

streamlink --retry-streams 10 --player mpv -r stream.mp4 <stream_url> best

Prerequisites

  1. Install Streamlink
  2. Install VLC or another video player of your choice.
  3. Optionally install youtube-dl. A simple install and usage guide is provided here. This will be used to download the stream's description and thumbnail for a more complete archive.

Instructions

The example will save the high quality stream available as stream.mp4 in the folder C:\Users\anon\stream_folder.

  1. Create a folder for where you want to save the stream to. You may want to user a temporary folder and then manually move it to the final destination afterwards.
  2. Open the command prompt, you will run commands here by copying and pasting commands and pressing enter.
    • Open the start menu and search for command prompt.
  3. Move to the folder where you want to save the stream to.
    • Command: cd "<path_to_folder_from_step_1>"
    • Example: cd "C:\Users\anon\stream_folder"
  4. Start recording the stream
    • Command: streamlink -r <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> best
    • Example: streamlink -r stream.mp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdUErEiRbk best

Advanced Scenarios

Save the stream in 720p.

This is useful when you do not have enough bandwidth for 1080p streams.

streamlink -r <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> 720p

Automatically start recording when the stream goes live.

When the waiting room is available, you can use this command to have streamlink try start recording every 10 seconds. This is very useful if you know you will not be present for the start of the stream.

streamlink --retry-streams 10 -r <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> best

Use MPV or MPC instead of VLC for video playback.

You may have to provide the full file path to the video player executable instead of just using the short name. To use the short name instead of the full file path, you have to add the file path of the video player to your PATH. Refer to the setx command here

mpv:

streamlink --player mpv -r <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> best

mpc:

streamlink --player mpc-hc64 -r <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> best

Only record the stream, do not play the stream.

Changing -r to -o in the command makes it only save to a file. This is useful to combine with --retry-streams 10 to record a stream that has been scheduled when you will not be present.

streamlink -o <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> best

streamlink --retry-streams 10 -o <name_to_save_stream_as>.mp4 <stream_url> best

Recording Members Only Streams

Recommended: streamlink-auth.ps1 script

This script will extract the right value out of a cookies.txt file and run streamlink with the arguments you provide it.

  1. Get a cookies.txt file. Refer to steps 1 to 4 here
  2. Copy streamlink-auth.ps1 and save it as streamlink-auth.ps1 where you installed streamlink.
    • Default installation location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Streamlink\bin
  3. Open Powershell.
    • Open the start menu (Windows key), type in powershell, open Windows Powershell
  4. Run the command streamlink-auth COOKIES_TXT_FILE_PATH STREAMLINK_ARGUMENTS
    • Example: You want to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hLmfV-wQKo and your cookies.txt file is located at C:\Users\anon\Documents\cookies.txt
    • streamlink-auth C:\Users\anon\Documents\cookies.txt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hLmfV-wQKo best
    • If you are running into issues with streamlink-auth not found, then copy the script somewhere else, and navigate to that folder in Powershell using the command cd <Path to folder containing script> and try again.

Directly with Streamlink

The above script is simply extracting the __Secure-3PSID cookie for .youtube.com and setting the --http-cookie command line arguement as --http-cookie __Secure-3PSID=<cookie value>. The line in the cookies.txt you are looking for looks like #HttpOnly_.youtube.com TRUE / TRUE 1667272763 __Secure-3PSID <Some random letters and numbers, this is the cookie value>. If you use the same cookies.txt with youtube-dl then the line might not start with #HttpOnly_.

Post Processing

The previous steps should have given you a working video file but it can be improved with a few simple steps. The following steps will convert the file to a real .mp4 file [note], add a fancy thumbnail, save the video description with the recording, and give the video a nice name.

Before and After:

Post Processing Difference

Do the following in PowerShell instead of command prompt. You can convert a command prompt into PowerShell by using the command powershell. You will have to open a new command prompt for PowerShell while your previous command prompt is busy running Streamlink.

  1. Generate a nice filename to be used later. Example generated filename: [Botan Ch.獅白ぼたん][20200830] 5期生より (fCqDv94ZeuA). You will want to do this step while the stream is still live.
$filename = youtube-dl --write-description --skip-download -o "[%(uploader)s][%(upload_date)s] %(title)s (%(id)s)" --get-filename <stream_url>
  1. Download the livestream's description and thumbnail as stream.description and stream.jpg respectively. You will want to do this step while the stream is still live, once the livestream ends and the archive is deleted, you will not have access to the description nor the thumbnail anymore.
youtube-dl --write-thumbnail --write-description --skip-download -o stream <stream_url>
  1. Store the livestream's description into variable $description.
$description = [IO.File]::ReadAllText(".\stream.description")
  1. Convert to .mp4, add thumbnaill, add the description to the video's comment and save the new video with a formatted name.
ffmpeg -i .\stream.mp4 -i .\stream.jpg -map 1 -map 0 -c copy -disposition:0 attached_pic -metadata comment=$description $($filename + ".mp4")

Script for the above.

FAQ

Real .mp4?

The original recording from streamlink is saved with a .mp4 file extension but it is actually a MPEG-TS format file. Most video players will still be able to play the recording since they understands the format and do not rely on the file extension.

The fake .mp4 extension is convenient for most people because their computers would be set up to use a video player to open files with the extension .mp4. Converting it to a real .mp4 file will reduce the file size without affecting quality.

My thumbnail was downloaded as a .webp file and that file format is not supported for thumbnails, how do I convert it?

Convert from .webp to .jpg. ffmpeg is wonderful.

ffmpeg -i stream.webp stream.jpg

I really really want to use youtube-dl, how do I record and playback at the same time?

youtube-dl -o - <stream_url>  best | tee stream.mp4 | mpv -

You can get tee by installing git. This will not work in PowerShell.

Why not use AtomicParsley to add the thumbnail?

AtomicParsley only records the first 255 characters of the video's comment. If you want to use it, do it before adding the comment.

How do I... ?

Read the manuals

  1. https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md (currently down due to dmca, refer to https://github.com/github/dmca/tree/416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f)
  2. https://ffmpeg.org/documentation.html
  3. https://streamlink.github.io/cli.html