Hey world. Meet Oxbow.
Twitch VODs, saved properly. For Mac.
So a bit of a story here.
As someone who identifies as Gen-X, I really never understood Twitch, or “Let’s Plays”. And then 2020 happened. And lockdown made us all do some slightly unhinged shit. Among many other things, I started watching people play video games online. Initially it was very casual. Just kind of lurk in on people playing some game I’d probably never play.
And then I got COVID and had to isolate from the family for a week. And let me tell you, dear reader, after the first couple of hours I was bored to tears. At some point, I stumbled across a streamer whom I’d become familiar with through their YouTube content (overly dramatic reactions) who had started some game called Persona 3 FES on her PlayStation 2… I had no idea what the Persona series even was. But with unlimited time to kill, I started watching.
An hour in, I decided to go back and watch the VODs from the beginning. I was hooked. With nothing else to do, I binged hours upon hours of streams. And it finally clicked for me. There was community in the chat. There were jokes. There was head-canon. In a few days I was caught up and watching the live broadcasts. Now I was part of the chat. I waited every day to tune in. I made some of the jokes.
And this game, man. This fucking game. How can a game that I’ve never even played now be my favorite gaming experience of all time?
Some time later, the same streamer began playing Persona 4: Arena Ultimax. Which is… well, it’s a bit of a crap spin-off, but I was invested. Unfortunately, my work schedule didn’t let me invest as much time anymore. But I had a plan—an upcoming 22-hour flight to Bangalore and back. I’ll throw some streams on my iPad and catch up.
That, it turns out, was much harder than I expected.
I ended up using some weird browser extension that chunked out 1-hour VODs very slowly, in terrible quality. And there was no chat. But I tell you, those crappy videos saved my bacon. I panicked about 6 hours in (couldn’t sleep, couldn’t watch movies, was losing my mind), and those VODs got me through the rest of the flight.
So I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years, and finally got to building it. (Which is maybe ironic, given that Twitch is hemorrhaging viewership and making terrible decisions as a company, but I digress.)
And the result is Oxbow. A native Mac app that provides a streamlined process to download VODs, and what I think is the killer feature: compositing the chat into the VOD for you. You get a single MP4 file that you can throw on your iPad or wherever, for offline viewing.
Under the hood, it’s based on TwitchDownloaderCLI, which, of all things, is written in .NET. So in our build process we actually install .NET, build the CLI for Mac, and sign and embed it in our app. Then there’s a bunch of Swift code to manage and interact with it. It’s been a fun thing to tinker on. Oh, and it’s free and open source.
BTW: Oxbow is not affiliated with Twitch — and whatever you download still belongs to whoever made it.