Fundamental flaw with the timestamp logic.

[ne0lith]

A lot of vods will be "unrecoverable", but it's because the timestamp on tracker sites/twitch is slightly wrong.
You get around that by brute forcing the seconds. But sometimes! The minute is off by 1-2. In the case the vod can't be found, you should probably brute force the minute with a 2 min margin back and forward. Obviously in those cases, you can't JUST brute the minute. the seconds would be off too most likely. From my own scripts, this seems to work 99% of the time. Excuse my english please. Also, I believe the issue is most common when the timestamp ends in a 0. for either the minutes, or seconds. This is the issue that causes other devs to charge people to recover missing vods with these apps.

[Shishkebaboo]

@ne0lith

This is a very rare occurrence. I've seen it only once or twice in the last three years. While there may be instances where the timing is slightly off, the likelihood that it impacts many users ability to recover videos is extremely low. Provided that the VODs being tried follow Twitch's storage policies, the results are generally as expected. In my experience, having recovered probably over 500 videos for others via this GitHub page, my own github, and the TwitchRecover Discord, the outcome typically meets expectations.

It's not the developers who charge for recovering rather it's random individuals who exploit the user base by leveraging pre-existing scripts or applications. These people charge for a service that, with just a bit more than a few minutes of research, users could likely perform themselves.

Paying someone to run a Python script developed by someone else is ridiculous... i'd say its borderline fraudulent.

[Shishkebaboo]

I believe that since this flaw is so rare, it's less of a flaw and more of an anomaly.

[ne0lith]

Curious. I have seen it 4-5 times the last month alone. But it may be because one of the channels I archive is very regimented, and they always start at the same time. Which is how I discovered this. Also, I haven't seen people pay to run these scripts per se, but charge to have a dev brute force finding a vod they believe exists. Just my opinion, that a lot of those are due to probably other anomaly's, but if this specific one is as rare as you say, I take your word. I also don't mean flaw with TwitchRecover's timestamp logic. But a rounding error on twitch itself.

[Shishkebaboo]

I'm not sure which website you use for monitoring start times, but in my experience, StreamsCharts is highly accurate. TwitchTracker, however, doesn't seem as reliable, so I can understand considering it a flaw if one were to rely solely on that website.

Ive seen instances where TwitchTracker has been off by 15-20 minutes specifically for split streams which my script and the main fork of my script checks for by comparing the m3u8 duration with the duration on the tracking website.