YouTube Chat Listener (Version 2) - Sustainable Live Chat Exploration

This project aims to create a robust, quota-friendly, open-source, and Linux-compatible solution for monitoring YouTube Live Chat. Our initial research indicated a gRPC endpoint, but further investigation revealed this is not publicly available. Therefore, this project is now focused on a deeper exploration of alternative, sustainable methods to acquire live chat data without relying on continuous, quota-limited API polling or requesting quota increases.

Project Goal

To identify and, if feasible, implement a sustainable, quota-friendly, compliant, open-source, and Linux-compatible method for receiving real-time YouTube Live Chat messages, processing them, and displaying them in the terminal with rich formatting. This goal explicitly rules out relying on YouTube Data API v3 quota increases.

Detailed Implementation Plan

For a detailed breakdown of the revised research and exploration steps, please refer to the DEVELOPMENT_PLAN.md file.

Current Status

The pytchat_listener.py script has been successfully implemented and tested for basic chat fetching and display. Key features include:

Full-width alternating backgrounds for readability.
Emoji coloring for standard emojis.
Persistent unique colors for chatters across sessions.

Installation and Usage

For detailed installation and usage instructions, please refer to the INSTALLATION.md file.

Dependencies

pytchat
rich
google-auth-oauthlib (for potential initial API calls or authentication research)
google-api-python-client (for potential initial API calls or authentication research)

Future Enhancements

Interactive message sending.
More advanced terminal UI (e.g., prompt_toolkit for input).
Web overlay integration.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Contributors

Matt North

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