[QUESTION] How do I get chat log from start of live youtube broadcast?

[kkawabat]

What is your question?

I am trying to get the full log of a YouTube broadcast from the very start of the broadcast however I'm only getting the log a minute before the request. The below is the gist of what I have

url =  <SAMPLE LIVE URL>
for chat in ChatDownloader().get_chat(url, start_time=0):
    print(pd.Timestamp(chat['timestamp']*1000))
    chat_log_list.append(chat)

The earliest chat log starts around a minute before the execution of this code.

I tried experimenting with different start_time values (None, -1000, "00:00:00") but nothing seems to give me earlier logs.

I have tested this with non-live videos and it seems to work fine.

for reference I'm using this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMj9QMQboYg&ab_channel=Destiny but it would probably stop being live so it might not be much help.

[kkawabat]

Semirelated question but is there an easy way to get the timestamp of when the video starts? I can get the publishing date from YouTube API but would be nice if I could utilize chat-downloader instead.

[xenova]

Hi there. Unfortunately it's not possible to get the chat replay of a video that is still live. You need to wait until the end of the stream to be able to view the past chat history.

[kkawabat]

I see, that's unfortunate. Thank you for the reply.