RT (name pending)

A Twitch and YouTube frontend written in Rust using Tauri and SvelteKit.

zfg1 playing OOT. Chat on Copium for Prime 4.

paganmars playing Monster Hunter Wilds. An excelent use of screen space with PiP.

Very old screenshots.

Features

• Import YouTube subscriptions.
• Add users to your stream and video feeds.
• Watch content in any of the available resolutions.
• View Twitch chat with 7tv and BetterTTV emotes.
• Block ads.
• Open videos or streams directly in the app using rt::// URLs.

Download

All installers (exe, deb, rpm) are provided in a small zip file.

Quick download.

Github Actions builds are available here.

About

Tested on Windows and Ubuntu. Not tested on macOS as I don't have access to a macOS machine, if you manage to build and test it, please let me know and I will work on fixing issues and adding it to the build bundles.

Redirects

On launch, a custom protocol handler is registered for rt:// URLs, this allows you to open videos or streams directly in the app.

If the app is not running, it will be started with the URL as an argument, if it is running, the URL will be opened in a new window.

YouTube:

• rt://yt/dQw4w9WgXcQ
• rt://youtube/dQw4w9WgXcQ
• rt://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• rt://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

Twitch:

• rt://tw/zfg1
• rt://twitch/zfg1
• rt://www.twitch.tv/zfg1

If using extensions like LibRedirect, you can set a frontend for YouTube like Invidious and set the instance URL to rt://yt. The same can be done for Twitch, you can set the frontend to SafeTwitch and set the instance URL to rt://tw.

Paths

To store users, feeds and emotes, SQLite is used with sqlx.

Data (databases, window state, etc):

• Windows: %AppData%/com.rt.app
• Linux: ~/.config/com.rt.app

Logs:

• Windows: %LocalAppData%/com.rt.app/logs
• Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/com.rt.app/logs or $HOME/.local/share/com.rt.app/logs

Frontends

YouTube:

Using the excellent RustyPipe library to interact with YouTube, its recommended to install rustypipe-botguard to use a YouTube player instead of the embedded one.

cargo install rustypipe-botguard

The feed uses YouTube's rss feed to retrieve videos to avoid rate limits, this sadly does not contain video duration.

The watch page will try to use RustyPipe to retrieve a YouTube player, if it fails, it will use Vidstack's YouTube provider to play videos via embeds, this fallback has the drawbacks of not being able to play videos that disallows embedding and not being able to select a video quality. You can also switch between them.

Twitch:

The player uses a custom hls.js loader that communicates with the backend to modify the streams m3u8 manifests, this is what allows for ad blocking as the backend can detect ads and switch to a backup stream until ads are over, this was inspired on TwitchAdSolutions method of switching streams.

The backend uses queries from the Twitch API to retrieve user data and stream playback.

TODO

• Update screenshots.
• Add information about the content somewhere in the watch page.
• Maybe make a custom player layout using tailwind.
• YouTube:
  • Add YouTube channel page with video search.
  • Allow downloading videos and thumbnails.
  • Search for videos in the feed.
  • Properly handle links in the description.
  • Fix mute/volume not working in the player-settings local storage.
• Twitch:
  • It seems there are issues with the avif format in emotes in Linux, maybe use webp or png instead.
  • Put the seek bar at the end when joining a stream, currently it is some seconds behind when first joining.
  • Add global Twitch emotes.