City17

I've switched to working on luminous-ttv, which so far is both easier to use and more reliable.

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City17

A Rust serverless function to retrieve and relay a playlist for Twitch livestreams/VODs.

By running this in specific countries and using a browser extension to redirect certain network requests to this function, Twitch will not display any ads.

I don't provide any pre-built version of this, you have to set it up yourself.

My rough estimate is that a few hundred to a few thousand users can be supported while staying inside the free tier's limits, but I wouldn't recommend publicizing your function unless you actually understand how the pricing works. If you're the only user you won't need to pay anything. (Supposedly there's no free tier on outbound bandwidth, but my bill in May was 0.000000 USD.)

You can probably run this as an actual server, but I haven't tested that because that costs money.

^{_{(I don't remember why I named this City17.)}}

Requirements

The function needs to be run in a country where Twitch doesn't serve ads. Countries currently known: Russia, China.

I don't know of any serverless provider that operates in Russia, and supports Rust, and allows use by people outside Russia. China has at least two providers that should work fine, one of which I've personally tested. (Some amount of GFW evasion takes place, since Twitch is blocked in China, but at least we can be pretty sure that Twitch won't start running ads there...?)

I've only successfully run this on Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) from Chinese regions, and the code will require modifications to run on a different provider. (Except Azure if I managed to avoid breaking it after my initial tests there; there's a feature flag.)

Tencent Cloud should also work with some minor modifications, but I've been unable to complete signup to test it.

Azure might work if any of its locations are non-ad countries. Twitch considers the UAE to be located inside the USA, so their Dubai location (UAE North) doesn't work. Azure doesn't allow use of their Chinese regions unless you're a business with a presence in China.

Building

If you're going to use Aliyun and do not intend to modify the code, download city17.zip from the latest release and proceed to the setup instructions.

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Run build.sh. Cannot be truly built in Windows due to ring, but cargo check and cargo build work for checking the code. Ubuntu 20.04 via WSL works fine and is what I use.

Once city17.zip is built, see setup instructions below.

Requires:

• Rust installed via rustup
• The x86_64-unknown-linux-musl target for Rust (rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl)
• 7za (p7zip-full on Debian and Ubuntu, can modify script to use normal zip command)
• musl-gcc (musl-tools)
• Probably build-essential

Aliyun setup instructions

1. Sign up, enable function compute, etc. (I'm not creating a new account just to write down all the steps)
2. Set the region to China (Shanghai). As far as I know this is the region closest to Tokyo, which is where one of Twitch's servers is.
3. In the Function Compute menu, enter Services and Functions and create a service named a. (Or whatever you want, but you'll need to modify the code.)
4. Create a function:
   • HTTP
   • Named prx
   • Custom Runtime
   • Select the ZIP file city17.zip
   • Give it 128MB of RAM and a 15-second timeout.

For future updates of the function, use the Code tab's "Upload Zip File". (Or get fcli, set it up, and run update.sh after build.sh)

Under the Code tab, use the URL listed there to set up the browser extension.

It looks like https://################.cn-shanghai.fc.aliyuncs.com/2016-08-15/proxy/a/prx/; you will need to add invoke to the end.

Issues

• If the shell scripts fail due to having Windows line endings, run

dos2unix build.sh
dos2unix update.sh

in your Linux shell. (This shouldn't happen.)

Extra reading

The streamlink Twitch plugin has all the info needed in order to learn how to connect to Twitch and get the M3U8 playlist. Some of it doesn't quite match what Twitch is doing now, so watch a Twitch stream normally and look at the network requests your browser makes.

License

GNU GPLv3.