Hi folks! Glad to see that the youtube-dl community has migrated to Lemmy.

As I documented in The Other Place, I previously put together a Windows batch script to continuously monitor a specific channel for livestreams and download them as they occur.

A recent change to YouTube resulted in https://www.youtube.com/%channel_name%/live no longer consistently linking to the most recent livestream. Fortunately, u/werid's suggestion of using --match-filter "live_status = is_live" on https://www.youtube.com/%channel_name%/streams still works, though I had to rework the script to not issue the download command for the same stream multiple times.

If anyone is interested or needs to do something similar, this is the current .bat script that I use:

@echo off
set channel_name=@SpaceX
:loop
@echo off
set DATE_TIME=%DATE:~6,4%-%DATE:~3,2%-%DATE:~0,2%_%TIME:~0,2%-%TIME:~3,2%-%TIME:~6,2%
set DATE_TIME=%DATE_TIME: =0%
set /A clock=%RANDOM% %% 80 + 1
set clock=%clock: =0%

set newLivestream=false
echo Looking for new %channel_name% livestreams...
@for /f %%i in ('yt-dlp --print id --match-filter "live_status = is_live" "https://www.youtube.com/%channel_name%/streams"') do (
	@if NOT defined %%i (
	set newLivestream=true
	echo New livestream found: %%i
	@set "%%i=false"
	start cmd /c yt-dlp --live-from-start -x -k -o "D:/Videos/%%(release_date)s_%%(channel)s_%%(id)s_%%(title)s.%%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%%i
	@set "%%i=true"
	@timeout /t 1
	)
)
if %newLivestream%==false (
	echo No new livestreams found
)
timeout /t %clock%
goto loop

You'll obviously need to change the channel_name and output template to suit your needs.