Live capture & the live logger

Live capture connects to a channel that's broadcasting right now and records every message as it arrives. When the session ends, you have a complete chat log on disk you can re-analyse later, share, or archive.

In effect the app doubles as a chat logger: leave a session running on a channel you care about and you get a self-contained, re-importable file in the same Chatterino-style format the app reads back natively.

How to import

The monitor opens and starts receiving messages immediately. No login or account is required — all platforms allow read-only chat connections without signing in.

Expected format

Live capture doesn't read a file — it produces one. Sessions are automatically saved to:

%LocalAppData%\Stream Chat Summary\live_logs\

One file per session, named after the session date, the platform, and the channel:

YYYY-MM-DD_{platform}_{channel}.txt

For example: 2024-01-15_twitch_streamer_user.txt. You can open this folder quickly via Help → Live Logs Folder.

A typical fragment of the file:

[19:30:12] streamer_user: stream's live!
[19:30:18] viewer123: PogU
[19:30:24] [raid] Raid from another_channel with 47 viewers
[19:32:08] new_sub_user: hi everyone first time here
[19:32:08] [sub] new_sub_user subscribed at Tier 1

The format is the same one Chatterino uses, with one extra convention: channel events (subs, raids, gifts, mod actions, announcements) are written as bracketed lines with a type tag. That tag is what lets the Events tab repopulate correctly when the log is re-imported later.

What the monitor window shows

• Messages grid — every message as it arrives, newest scrolling in at the bottom (the grid keeps the most recent 5,000 messages on screen; older rows scroll out of view)
• Stats panel — live counters that refresh every few seconds: total messages, total events, unique chatters, current rate (messages/minute), and session duration
• Top chatters — the most active users in the session so far
• Events — subs, raids, follows, and other channel events (the grid keeps the most recent 2,000 events on screen)

You can leave the window running in the background. The app adds a tray icon while a session is active: green for live, grey for idle. Right-click the tray icon for:

• Show Monitor — bring the monitor window back to the front
• Disconnect & Close — end the session immediately

Double-clicking the tray icon is a shortcut for Show Monitor.

Closing the monitor window itself while a session is active hides it to the tray rather than ending the session — use Disconnect & Close to actually end it. Closing the main app window while a session is active asks you to confirm first, since that disconnects the live monitor too (and so does restarting the app to apply a theme change).

Conversation view

Click any username in the messages grid to open a conversation thread for that chatter in a separate window.

The thread shows every message the chatter sent alongside every message that @mentioned them. Messages that only mention other people are left out, so the thread stays focused on the selected chatter. The most recent 200 thread messages are kept on screen; once older ones scroll off the top, the count reads "200 of N messages".

The conversation window stays open as new messages arrive and updates live, with emotes and emoji rendered inline just as in the main message grid. Clicking the same username again brings the window to the front; clicking a different username switches to that chatter's thread.

See Conversation view for the full details.

Acknowledging events

Tick Track events in the monitor header to turn on the acknowledgement column. The preference is saved, so you only need to enable it once — it will be on the next time you open the monitor.

The events grid then shows a checkbox column on rows that are worth thanking the user for — so you can tick each one off as you cover them on stream and tell at a glance which events you still owe a shout-out to.

A checkbox appears for:

• Subscriptions — new subs, resubs, gift subs, anon gift subs, and sub mystery gifts
• Bits
• Raids and community pay-forwards
• Channel point redeems
• Shoutouts received

Moderation actions (timeouts, bans, unbans), system notices, and any event whose type couldn't be classified show a muted "—" instead of a checkbox.

When someone gifts a batch of subs (e.g. "10 Tier 1 Subs to the community"), only the summary row at the top of the batch gets a checkbox — the per-recipient rows beneath it show "—". Tick the summary row once and the whole batch is covered. Single gift subs sent to a named user are unaffected and still get their own checkbox.

Click the column header to tick all acknowledgeable events at once — or untick them all if every one is already checked. Useful at the end of a busy stretch when you want to mark everything as covered in one go.

The Events tab caption shows the number of outstanding (un-thanked) events with a star (Events [N] ★) whenever at least one acknowledgeable event is still unticked, so you can see at a glance how many you still owe — even when the Chat tab is in front. Ticking the last outstanding event clears it back to just Events; unticking one brings the count back. (The running total of all events is shown in the stats panel, not the tab.)

Auto-refreshing the main view

The monitor can periodically push its current state back into the main window's analysis. This lets you watch highlights, engagement tiers, and charts update as the stream progresses.

Toggle this in the monitor window — by default it refreshes every 30 seconds or after a certain number of new messages. For long streams, slow the cadence to 60 seconds or so; each refresh re-runs the full analysis, which is cheap for short captures but adds up over a 12-hour subathon.

All platforms supported

The channel must be actively live when you connect — YouTube's API only returns an activeLiveChatId for streams that are currently broadcasting. There is no fallback to scheduled or completed streams.

See Supported events for the complete list.

Re-importing a saved session

To analyse a saved log later:

The result is identical to the analysis you'd have seen if you'd kept the live session open — except now you can rerun with different analysis settings, compare against another stream, or pass the log to someone else for their own analysis.

Common use cases

Capture once, analyse later

Start a capture before the stream goes live, walk away. When you come back, the log is on disk waiting for you to import with whatever analysis settings make sense.

Always-on archive

For your own channel, leaving a capture running on every broadcast gives you a complete chat history that survives Twitch's VOD retention limits — even after Twitch deletes your VOD, you still have a clean text record.

Compare two streams

Capture two different streams (your channel, a competitor, a guest appearance) and reimport each. With both as separate .txt files you can switch between them to compare engagement tiers, peak moments, and chatter overlap.

Hand off to an editor

The text file is small (typically tens to a few hundred KB even for multi-hour streams), so it's easy to share via Discord or email. The recipient can import it and explore the same analysis you saw.

Long-running considerations

The live logger is happy to run for as long as your session does — 12-hour subathons and multi-day marathons work fine. A few things worth knowing for extended captures:

• One file per session. Closing and reopening the monitor starts a new file. If you keep the same session open from end to end, you get a single continuous log.
• Disk usage is modest. Even a busy 12-hour stream typically produces a log under 10 MB. Hundreds of captures will fit comfortably in live_logs/.
• Reconnects don't fragment. When the monitor drops and reconnects, the same file keeps being appended to. You don't end up with one file per network blip.
• The on-screen grids are capped, the log is not. To stay responsive over long sessions, the window keeps only the most recent 5,000 messages and 2,000 events visible — but every message and event is still written to the log file and counted in the stats, and the full session is sent to the main window when you update the analysis view.

Editing logs by hand

Because the format is plain text, you can hand-edit a .log file — remove a stretch you don't want analysed, fix a misclassified line, or stitch two captures together. Save the result and reimport.

The Supported events page lists every event type's tag if you want to add or modify event lines manually.

Analysis options

The Live Stream Monitor doesn't expose an analysis options panel. The auto-refresh pipeline uses a fixed configuration so you can focus on the live view:

To re-run a captured session with the full controls — different sensitivity, stricter duplicate matching, emote-only filtering — reimport the saved log via Import → Log File (Chatterino) as covered above. That dialog shares the same duplicate, emote, and highlight controls as every other importer; see Import analysis options for the full explanation of each setting.