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 — both platforms allow read-only chat connections from anonymous viewers.

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
• Stats panel — live counters that refresh every few seconds: messages received, unique chatters, current rate (messages/minute), and peak rate so far
• Top chatters — the most active users in the session so far
• Events — subs, raids, follows, and other channel events

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.

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.

Both platforms supported

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.

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.

Next: Import analysis options →