digested clips
Subreddit scraper to create Youtube mirrors for Twitch clips
Twitch clips are common on reddit. Capturing small snippets of a livestream and then posting to community subreddits gets some of the most attention of the day. However, Twitch clips are always a pain to watch; they’re slow to load (especially on mobile), buffer way too often, and scrubbing in any direction makes the previous two issues worse. I can’t seem to watch a 30 second video unless I wait upwards of 5 minutes while sipping my already cold coffee and eating my stale sandwich on my lunch break reading reddit.
So I decided I’ve had enough is enough one day and created a bot to scrape a subreddit and comment YouTube mirrors for me. My specific instance is hosted on this channel. I’ve written detailed instructions on how to get the bot up and running in the README for anyone that wants to host it. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of restriction with rate limiting for uploading videos to YouTube; and understandably so. The bot also needs a refresh token once in a while from Twitch. This makes the bot naive and dependent on maintenance.
Future alternatives include uploading to Streamable (API currently doesn’t allow it) or playing a pure MP4 download from a natively hosted app. Any ideas, let me know.
UPDATE 03/25/2021: Alas, Google has had enough. It is now against Youtube Community Guidelines to post videos that are considered spam, and since the Twitch clips are about 30s max, they land under that category. There may be a future in Streamable, but Youtube is probably not the move anymore.
Reference link to guidelines.
Take a look at the project if you want: digested clips
Sup
Software engineer @ LitePoint.