[Feature]: Compatibility with 7TV

[XHawk87]

Checklist

• This is a suggestion for LiveTL, not Hyperchat. I will go to the Hyperchat repo to suggest a feature for Hyperchat.
• This is a suggestion for the LiveTL web extension, not LiveTL iOS or LiveTL Android. I will go to the iOS or Android repo to suggest features for those platforms.
• I have checked for a duplicate or similar feature request/issue. I made sure to check closed issues as well.
• I am not reporting a bug. If I am, I will use the bug report issue template.
• By submitting this issue, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

This currently doesn't work with the popular 7TV browser extension: https://7tv.app/
This isn't surprising since it does a complete overhaul on chat to improve performance and adds a lot of customisation features, which makes it very difficult to scrape from reliably. As a result, nothing gets passed to the embed or the popout window.

Describe the solution you'd like

Rather than scrape the HTML, use IRC to connect to the channel directly. Twitch uses their own flavour of IRC, but for this purpose any standard client should be good enough just to read chat messages and pass them to a translation API. It would greatly enhance compatibility with any other extensions operating on this screen.

Twitch Chat API docs: https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc/

There is also an undocumented twitch guest user you can use to anonymously connect to any channel if you don't want to use a bot account:

nick: justinfan[number between 1000 and 80999 inclusive]
password: SCHMOOPIIE

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Anything else?

No response

[r2dev2]

For extensions like 7TV, YouTube compatibility would entail either implementing their entire extension or them integrating with us so it is out of scope.

Twitch compatibility seems more doable. We currently parse HTML instead of using IRC for twitch chat because we don't know how to handle messages in case the user scrolls through an archive video. Parsing the HTML allows us to avoid having to figure out the API for this scenario. If you know of a way to get currently showing messages of an archive VOD, please let us know as that would help if we decide to add compatibility with 7TV.

Also, we do have compatibility with FFZ since #391 in v8.1.0 if you want to use the custom twitch emojis.

All that being said, it may take some time for feature updates to manifest into the extension. We are currently working on restructuring LiveTL, Hyperchat, and YTCFilter to work together and with MV3 as well as internationalization.

[XHawk87]

Wow, thanks for getting back to me so quick with such a detailed explanation.

If you know of a way to get currently showing messages of an archive VOD, please let us know as that would help if we decide to add compatibility with 7TV.

Ah, I hadn't considered archive VODs. That rings a bell, but I don't know off the top of my head. Some research required.

Also, we do have compatibility with FFZ since #391 in v8.1.0 if you want to use the custom twitch emojis.

FFZ is nice but 7TV provides a lot more than just emotes. I'm a moderator on a busy channel, and its performance, customisation features and mod tools are really handy. I'm very interested in LiveTL for the same reason, as we get people popping in and speaking other languages often.

All that being said, it may take some time for feature updates to manifest into the extension. We are currently working on restructuring LiveTL, Hyperchat, and YTCFilter to work together and with MV3 as well as internationalization.

Understood. Thanks for letting me know. I've posted an issue on their end now as well: SevenTV/Extension#618

[XHawk87]

It looks like there is no documented endpoint for VOD chat history. The old v5 endpoint is gone, now we have to use GraphQL: lay295/TwitchDownloader@4ea98fe#diff-29aa56a1114a96ee681c913993d23053b45d2216b044d084dc9fdbc4847cf692R118