Youtube Live Stream Chat Messages

Question

I have been looking into getting messages from my live stream on youtube. I have a need to be able to process the chat in real time howver I have come to find a few issues.

For starter and the main issue really is that the order in which the chat comes through seems to be oldest first. This is rather a problem as if I am trying to handle new chat messages in real time, as the stream goes on the new messages go further and further down the list.

I must get next page keys which is a nightmare are the smallest page size i can requst from the api is 200 messages.

Its making the load a lot more that it needs to be.

Does anyone know how i might request the chat messages newest first or better handle the chat stream?

Im using PHP to read the API and I can read the messages into a database but i still have to go deeper and deeper as the chat goes on rather than just pull the new ones off the top.

Answer 1

You should be saving the last nextPageToken response you get from calling the list endpoint. This way, you can call the endpoint with the pageToken, getting only the new messages from the last time you queried the API.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/live/docs/liveChatMessages/list