StreamLogger

After turning off stream on Twitch, the first thing I normally do is exporting the stream video to YouTube, so that the stream has an archive that survives Twitch's short-ish retain policy.

These videos, perhaps surprisingly, get a few views! It's not a lot by any measures, but I'm conscientious of the fact that a typical stream archive is a multi-hour long video with no content curation, no clear schedule, and it sometimes contains breaks. Needless to say, watching them after-the-fact requires some (or a lot of) fast-forwarding.

So, last week on stream, I set out to improve the fast-forwarding experience. YouTube has this feature that lets you jump to specific timestamp in the video through a URL parameter in the video' link. Further, they generate this parameter for text in video's description, if the text is in the right format. This is handy for generating a "table of content" for the video so that viewers can click the timestamp in the description to jump to the section they are most interested in.

StreamLogger is a little utility that lets me note down what happened while I'm streaming. It's kind of like writing a commit message, except the message describes what happened since the last "commit". These messages, along with their associated timestamps, will be used by StreamLogger to generate the "table of content". Using it in command line looks like this:

# Turn on stream, maybe check signs of being live, etc. Then
slog start # start a new log

# Do stuff, when it comes to a natural conclusion point...
slog -- 'I did stuff'

# Do more stuff...
slog -- 'some other stuff'

# Some time later... end stream
# No action is required to end the stream as far as StreamLogger is concerned.

# Now, to generate the table-of-content
slog stamp -s 1:32

That last command outputs

0:01:32 I did stuff
1:41:59 some other stuff

... which goes to the video's description.

There's a few subtleties in this overall simple tool.

Whenever a message is added, it gets associated with the time at which the previous message was add. So the act of logging marks both the end of a chapter and the beginning of the next.

In reality, there's always going to be a gap between the start of the stream and the time the log is initialized. That's what the -s 1:32 in the last command is trying to correct. It tells StreamLogger the length of the gap. Now the absolute time associated with each event has a relationship with the archive video.

I chose to write this in Rust because I'm going to need the final product on Linux, macOS, and Windows since I stream on all 3 platforms. (fun fact: I never built it directly on my PC running Linux. Instead, I simply downloaded the musl-based build from the GitHub release, which was built by GitHub Actions. It works beautifully.) Maybe one day I'll add a GUI for it that works across these platforms, too, so that it's more friendly to wider group of users.

The more I use and think about StreamLogger, the more I like it. You can see me working its entirety in the following archives ;)

Part 1: https://youtu.be/xWRcdaEjir4 Part 2: https://youtu.be/RS-ZMBzu9Dg