LiveDeck: an unofficial Twitch client for Steam Deck, SteamOS and Windows, made for a TV and a controller

LiveDeck is a free, open-source Twitch app you drive entirely with a gamepad: browse live streams and categories, watch with chat, and sign in to see who you follow and write in chat. It is built for the couch and for SteamOS Game Mode on the Steam Deck, and it also runs on Windows (and Linux) with a controller or keyboard. Written in Rust with Slint, libmpv and Streamlink.

This is not an official Twitch or Valve product, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by either. Twitch and Steam are trademarks of their owners.

Use it at your own risk. It finds streams through unofficial, undocumented Twitch endpoints. They can break without notice, and using them may conflict with the Twitch Terms of Service. The software comes with no warranty (see LICENSE). You are responsible for how you use it.

Why it exists: I made this for myself, because I wanted to watch Twitch on my TV from the couch without a mouse and keyboard, and the existing options did not fit. I am sharing it in case it is useful to someone else. It is a hobby project: expect rough edges, and things get fixed when I have time. Contributions are very welcome (see Contributing).

What works

• Home with a featured stream, Top Live and Categories; a Browse screen for all categories; a screen per category
• Watching live streams (video through libmpv, hardware decoding where available)
• A player menu (Start while watching) for quality, hardware decoding, latency and zoom, plus a stats box with resolution, codec, bitrate, buffer and dropped frames
• Audio only, per stream from the player menu: plays just the sound to save bandwidth and battery, on a black screen with a slowly drifting watermark
• A sleep timer in the player menu (15 to 120 minutes): asks "Still watching?" a minute before the end, then fades out, stops the stream and puts the device to sleep
• Subscribe from the player menu: a QR code of the channel's subscribe page to finish on your phone, or (outside Game Mode) open it in a browser
• Chat with coloured names, badges and emotes, as a side panel or an overlay on the video
• Write in chat (signed in) with an on-screen keyboard (letters, punctuation, common emotes) or one-press quick messages, while the stream keeps playing
• Sign in with a code and a QR code (no password typed on the TV), then a Followed row and a Following tab
• Search for channels and categories by name with an on-screen keyboard (signed in)
• Live notifications: a silent popup when a channel you follow goes live, on any screen (signed in, can be turned off)
• Follow raids: when the channel you watch raids another one, a card counts down 10 seconds and takes you there (A goes now, B stays). Signed in
• Hype trains: while one runs in the channel you watch, a bar at the top of the video shows its level, progress and time left. Signed in or not, through the same unofficial API the website uses
• Multiview: watch up to nine streams at once in a grid (2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 places, or Spotlight with the stream with sound big). One stream has sound, A moves it or goes full screen, and the picture of each tile is sized to its place on screen. Signed in
• Favorites: your own list of channels, Kick and Twitch mixed, with a Home row and a screen of their own. Signed in
• Slow networks: when a multiview stream stalls, the muted tiles drop to a lower quality first, and the stream with sound last
• Captions for Twitch streams, videos and clips, made on your device (see Captions)
• Settings for chat layout, video quality and live notifications, saved between runs
• Everything controllable with a gamepad (D-pad, A/B/X/Y, Start, LB/RB, View)

What does not

• No 7TV/BTTV/FFZ emotes yet
• Signed out, each row shows only its first page (about 30 items), because Twitch's anonymous API allows no more. Sign in for full paging
• It does not block or skip ads
• Captions are not in multiview, not for sound-only streams and not for Kick
• Linux/Steam Deck builds are new and not yet tested on a real Deck

To do

Ideas and plans, from easiest to hardest. Nothing here exists yet.

Big project

• Kick support: watch Kick streams next to Twitch, read-only: a Top Live row on Home, Kick channels in Search, playback through Streamlink, and chat over Kick's own WebSocket. Parked: Kick sign-in (it needs a client secret, so it would need a pairing service) and Kick follows, which Kick has no API for. See plan/11-kick-support.md

Parked

• Predictions and polls: viewers can't take part from LiveDeck. Betting channel points and voting only work on the Twitch website or app, and polls can't even be read without a twitch.tv login. Showing a prediction you can't join wasn't worth it

Install

Download the latest build from the Releases page of this repository.

Windows

1. Download LiveDeck-vX.Y.Z-windows-x64.zip and unpack it anywhere.
2. Run livedeck.exe. That is all: video (libmpv) and Streamlink are in the folder, nothing else needs installing.

The program is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher. Choose More info, then Run anyway. To remove it, delete the folder (settings stay in %APPDATA%\livedeck).

Steam Deck / Linux (Flatpak, experimental)

flatpak install --user LiveDeck-vX.Y.Z-linux-x86_64.flatpak
flatpak run io.github.livedeck.LiveDeck

To use it in Game Mode, switch to Desktop Mode, then in Steam choose Add a Non-Steam Game and pick LiveDeck. Leave the controller layout on the default Gamepad template (see packaging/steam-input). The Flatpak is experimental: if it does not build or run for you, please open an issue with the output.

Build from source

Needs Rust (stable). Without video:

cargo run -p livedeck --release

With video you also need libmpv and Streamlink:

• Windows: download the mpv-dev-x86_64-* package from shinchiro/mpv-winbuild-cmake releases, unpack it, and run packaging/windows/make-import-lib.ps1 -Dir <folder> from a Developer PowerShell (it creates the mpv.lib that MSVC needs). Install Streamlink (pip install streamlink, or point HTPC_STREAMLINK at a copy). Then:

  $env:MPV_LIB_DIR = "<folder with libmpv-2.dll and mpv.lib>"
  $env:PATH = "$env:MPV_LIB_DIR;$env:PATH"
  cargo run -p livedeck --release --features mpv

• Linux: install libmpv 2.x development files (libmpv-dev / mpv-libs), libudev-dev, libfontconfig1-dev, libxkbcommon-dev and Streamlink, then cargo run -p livedeck --release --features mpv.

To make the portable Windows zip yourself, see packaging/windows/package.ps1. For captions during development, HTPC_CAPTIONS_MODEL and HTPC_CAPTIONS_VAD_MODEL point at local model files instead of the download.

Use

Input	Action
D-pad / left stick / arrow keys	Move focus
A / Enter	Select, watch, change a setting
B / Esc / Backspace	Back (on Search: delete a character first)
X / r	Retry a failed load (while watching with chat shown: write in chat)
Y / y	Show or hide chat
Start / Menu key	Open or close the left menu (while watching: the player menu)
View (the small button left of the face buttons) / v	Multiview: add a stream to the set, or open the options of the grid or full screen
LB / RB / Page Up / Page Down	Change the page of the chat keyboard

• Sign in: open the left menu, choose Sign in, and scan the QR code (or go to the address shown and type the code) on your phone. Signing out is on the Settings screen.
• Search: in the left menu (sign in first). Type with the on-screen keyboard: the D-pad moves, A types, X deletes, Y adds a space, Start jumps to the results. Results update as you type, from two characters on: live channels, categories, then offline channels. Up from the first row (or B) goes back to the keyboard. On a PC you can also just type.
• Write in chat: while signed in, press X with chat shown (or choose Write in chat in the player menu). A keyboard opens under the video (side panel) or over its bottom (overlay), and the stream keeps playing. The D-pad moves and A types; LB/RB switch between letters, digits and punctuation, and common emotes (typed as their codes, which Twitch turns into emotes). Shift capitalises the next letter, pressed twice it locks. X deletes, Y adds a space, Start sends, B closes the keyboard (the text waits until you send it or change channel). Up from the top row reaches the quick messages: A sends one at once. Slow mode, followers-only and subscribers-only show above the box, and if Twitch refuses a message the reason shows there and the text stays. On a PC, or with Steam's keyboard (STEAM + X), you can also just type. Messages go through Twitch's official API with the user:write:chat permission. If you signed in before this feature, LiveDeck asks you to sign in once more. The quick messages are quick_messages in config.toml. LiveDeck keeps to Twitch's limit of 20 messages in 30 seconds.
• Settings: chat layout (side panel or over the video), video quality (applies to the next stream you open) and live notifications.
• Live notifications: while signed in, LiveDeck checks every 30 seconds which channels you follow are live, and shows a popup at the top right for each one that just went live (not the one you are watching, and not after a quick stream restart). Popups stay 8 seconds and take no buttons. Turning them off in Settings stops the checks.
• Follow raids: while signed in, LiveDeck listens through Twitch EventSub (a WebSocket, one subscription for the channel on screen) for that channel raiding another one. A card shows who is raiding whom and counts down 10 seconds; then, or when you press A, the player switches to the raided channel with its chat, keeping your player-menu choices, the sleep timer and audio only. B keeps you where you are. Back from the new channel returns to the browse screens.
• Player menu: press Start while watching. Up/Down pick a row, Left/Right change it, B closes it. Quality and latency reload the stream; hardware decoding and zoom (Fill crops the picture to fill a 16:10 screen) apply at once. Stats shows a box with live numbers and stays on from stream to stream. Sleep timer counts down whatever you watch (switching channels does not reset it); a minute before the end any button keeps going for the same length again, otherwise the sound fades, the stream stops and the device suspends. Nothing in this menu is saved: it lasts until the app quits, and every run starts from the Settings screen's values.
• Multiview: while signed in, press View on a live channel card to add it to the set (a tick shows it, and a tray in the corner counts them). Watch the N together starts the set in a grid. In the grid, A moves the sound to the stream you press it on, or goes full screen on the stream with sound; B goes back to browsing with the set still picked. LB/RB change the layout, and Y shows the chat of the stream with sound. View opens the options: add a stream (Favorites or Following), remove one, star it, or leave. A stream's quality follows its size on screen, and a change of quality loads the new picture behind the old one, so it does not go black. After five seconds without a button the captions and controls fade and the streams fill the window. Full screen: A pauses, and play jumps back to live; LB/RB move to the previous or next stream.
• Favorites: View on a channel card (or the picker in multiview) stars it. Favorites are listed on their own screen and in a Home row, live ones first. They are saved in favorites.toml.
• Config file: config.toml is created on first run in %APPDATA%\livedeck\config (Windows) or ~/.config/livedeck (Linux). It holds chat_layout, quality, live_notifications, background_play, image_cache_max_mb, quick_messages, captions, captions_quality, caption_delay and an optional client_id. The starred channels are in favorites.toml and the last multiview set (which Home's Resume multiview card starts) in multiview.toml, both in the data folder next to the sign-in fallback. LiveDeck writes those two itself.
• Try it offline: livedeck --mock runs with fixture data and no network. Its live channels play generated test pictures, so the player and multiview can be tried too (this needs the video build, see Build from source).
• Logs: set RUST_LOG=livedeck=debug, or RUST_LOG=livedeck::captions=debug for caption timing. HTPC_LOG=<file> writes the log, and any crash, to that file instead of the terminal (a Windows release build has none unless started from one). livedeck --help lists every option and environment variable.

Captions

Captions are made on your device by a speech model, with no cloud and no account. They work on Twitch live streams, videos and clips, in the single player only.

• Turn on: choose Captions in the player menu (Start). The first time, the speech model downloads into the models folder in the data folder, with a progress bar. It is not in the package. The download is checked and can resume if it stops.
• Caption quality: Fast, Standard (the default) or Best, in the player menu. Standard is about 61 MB in all and keeps up on a modern laptop CPU. Fast is tiny.en at 78 MB, for slow machines or faster playback. Best is small at 190 MB, multilingual, and only offered on GPU (Vulkan) builds: the Linux / Steam Deck Flatpak, not Windows.
• Windows runs on the CPU. Use Fast on a slow machine or at faster playback speeds. At 2× on continuous speech, captions fall behind.
• Delay video for caption sync: on by default, for live streams only. The picture and chat are held back about 10 to 12.5 seconds so that the captions line up with the speech. Turn it off in the player menu if you prefer no delay.
• Videos and clips are transcribed up to 30 seconds ahead. The first 3 to 4 seconds after a start or a jump may have no caption on time.
• Words appear one by one, in two lines at the bottom of the picture.
• The data folder is %APPDATA%\livedeck\data on Windows and ~/.var/app/io.github.livedeck.LiveDeck/data in the Flatpak.
• Limits: there is no disk-space check before a download, old models are deleted by hand, and if captions stop part-way through a stream they start again on the next play or seek.

Using your own Twitch application (forks)

Signing in needs a Twitch application's client ID. This project's public ID is built in (DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID in crates/app/src/main.rs); a client ID is public, not a secret, and the app has no client secret. If you fork or repackage the app, register your own at https://dev.twitch.tv/console (Client Type Public, any OAuth redirect URL such as http://localhost:3000, the Device Code flow never uses it), then set TWITCH_CLIENT_ID, or client_id in config.toml, or replace the constant. Never commit tokens.

Contributing

Bug reports, testing on real hardware (especially a Steam Deck), fixes and features are all welcome. Please open an issue first for anything large so we do not duplicate work.

Good places to start

• Test the Flatpak on a Steam Deck / under Gamescope and report what breaks or fix it (packaging/flatpak)
• Resume from sleep, 4K and ultrawide behaviour
• 7TV / BTTV / FFZ emotes
• Translations, accessibility, controller glyphs for other pads

Setup

git clone <this repository>
cd livedeck
cargo run -p livedeck -- --mock      # no account, no network needed

Before you open a pull request run all of these; CI runs the same:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace
cargo deny check        # optional locally, needs cargo-deny (see deny.toml)

How the code is organised

Crate	Role
crates/core (htpc-core)	Pure state: AppState, Intent, Event, Command and the reduce function. No UI, network or IO, fully unit-tested
crates/ui (htpc-ui)	The Slint files (a pure view) and the view-model that turns AppState into Slint models
crates/input	Keyboard and gamepad (gilrs) to Intent
crates/twitch (htpc-twitch-api)	Helix client (including sending chat), anonymous GQL client, device-code login
crates/chat	Anonymous IRC-over-WebSocket chat for reading, emotes, badges, room modes
crates/resolver	Stream URL lookup through Streamlink
crates/player	libmpv rendering into the Slint window (feature mpv)
crates/storage	Config, token storage (keyring or private file), image cache
crates/app	The livedeck binary: wiring, store loop, command execution

Data flows one way: input becomes an Intent, reduce returns the new state and a list of Commands, the app runs the commands off the UI thread and feeds results back as Events. Navigation logic belongs in reduce, not in the .slint files. Network, chat, player and resolver sit behind traits and have fakes, so tests need no network. Colours, sizes and durations live in crates/ui/ui/theme.slint. Platform-specific code goes behind #[cfg], as development happens on Windows and the target is Linux.

By contributing you agree your work is released under the project's licence (GPL-3.0-only).

Frequently asked questions

Is this the official Twitch app for Steam Deck? No. It is an independent hobby project.

Is it safe, and will my Twitch account be banned? I do not know, and cannot promise. The app reads public information and, if you sign in, uses Twitch's official OAuth Device Code flow with permission to see your follows and to write chat messages as you (only when you send one). You sign in with your Twitch account; LiveDeck has no accounts of its own. Stream lookup uses the same unofficial approach as Streamlink. Use it at your own risk.

Does it block ads? No, and it does not try to.

Why Streamlink and libmpv? Twitch's official API does not give video URLs. Streamlink finds the stream, libmpv plays it. Both are bundled in the releases. Stream lookup sits behind a StreamResolver trait so it can be replaced.

Why does signed-out browsing show so few streams? The anonymous web API only returns a first page. Signing in switches to the official API, which pages properly.

Licence

GPL-3.0-only, see LICENSE. Release packages bundle other software under its own licences, listed in packaging/THIRD_PARTY.md. The interface font is Atkinson Hyperlegible (SIL OFL 1.1).