Redirect YouTube Live Chat

A simple Python 🐍 server that redirects to a YouTube 📺 channel's most recent live chat 💬 URL.

This script is primarily intended to run as a local server that can be embedded as multiple browser sources or Browser Docks in OBS Studio. The server will redirect 👉 to the most recent live chat URL for the given YouTube channel ID.

Rationale

My OBS setup references YouTube live chat URLs in three different places; it was tedious updating them all prior to going live 📡 Now I reference http://localhost:8008 instead and the server takes care of the rest.

Caveats

The script does not use YouTube APIs, it will blindly 🙈 derive a live chat URL from the most recent videoId found for the given channel; even if that videoId wasn't a live stream. This is by design to keep things simple.

Usage

usage: redirect-livechat.py [-h] [--addr ADDR] [--port PORT] channel_id

YouTube live chat re-director

positional arguments:
  channel_id            youtube channel ID

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --addr ADDR, -a ADDR  ip address
  --port PORT, -p PORT  port to listen on

example:

  redirect-livechat.py UCQvWX73GQygcwXOTSf_VDVg

This will start a webserver on localhost:8008, the output looks something like this:

Directing to https://www.youtube.com/live_chat?dark_theme=1&is_popout=1&v=D87-XmWigY0 via localhost:8008
127.0.0.1 - - [18/Feb/2021 13:30:15] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -

Ctrl + C exits.

From Docker

Run the following commands to build and run the Docker container:

$ docker build -t redirect-livechat .
$ docker run -p 8008:8008 -it redirect-livechat -a 0.0.0.0 UCQvWX73GQygcwXOTSf_VDVg

From Source

• Clone this git repository
• Run redirect-livechat.py with a YouTube channel ID.
• Update your OBS browser source(s) and Browser Dock(s) to reference http://localhost:8008

TODO

• Make a Snap
• Make a Docker