viewercount

Just a small executable I made for myself using rust-nostr to update the viewer count on zap.stream live streams.

If you self-host your own stream (by providing a m3u8 URL), then by default, zap.stream always shows '0 viewers' because the stream is not hosted by zap.stream's servers, so they can't possibly know the number of viewers by themselves.

Fortunately, nostr NIP53 Live Activies replaceable events may contain a special current_participants tag that signals to nostr clients the number of live stream viewers.

There was no previously existing software that allowed to change that tag.

I made viewercount so that you can run it on the same machine that is hosting the m3u8 live stream and periodically update the current_participants tag of your live stream NIP53 events.

Install

cargo install viewercount

The viewercount binary will be in ~/.cargo/bin/viewercount

Or manually:

git clone https://github.com/sommerfelddev/viewercount
cd viewercount
cargo build --release

The viewercount binary will be in target/release/viewercount.

Usage

Usage: viewercount [OPTIONS] [NADDRS]...

Arguments:
  [NADDRS]...  specific naddrs of Live Events to update, if none, all user authored Live Events that are 'live' will be updated

Options:
  -i, --interval <INTERVAL>  watch interval in seconds [default: 60]
      --reset-nip46          remove previously cached NIP46 signer credentials and ask for new ones
      --use-nsecbunker       use an externally provided nsecbunker URI instead of generating a nostrconnectURI by default
  -h, --help                 Print help
  -V, --version              Print version

You can just run it without any arguments. It will provide you with a in-client auto generated NIP46 nostrconnect URI which you can use to login remotely using Amber, Keystache, nsec.app or nsecbunker.com. If the app does not have good support for generated nostrconnect:// URIs, you can pass --use-nsecbunker and paste a nsecbunker URI instead of scanning a QR code.

You just need to copy paste the URI on the first run, and it will then use your NIP65 outbox relays in combination with zap.stream's default relays.

The daemon will measure the number of live stream HLS connections by checking for system TCP sockets on source port 443 with an established state that lasts longer than 1 second.