StreamLink for Better Twitch Quality

Twitch can be really heavy on your CPU. While watching a steam at 1080p 60fps CPU usage can fluctuate between 18-24% usage, but there’s a better approach to watching Twitch streams. The only negative side affects is that Twitch.tv may not register you as a viewer if you use this method. The solution is to watch Twitch via a publicly available Twitch API called StreamLink which is available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. This software allows anyone to watch a live-stream via Linux terminal and Windows PowerShell. By watching like this you remove the website part of the story thus saving a lot of resources.

Installation for Debian-Based Distros

Copy and paste the following code into your terminal one line at a time.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install streamlink

After you finish those steps proceed to your terminal and type streamlink <streamurl> <quality>. If a stream only has one quality option you should pick worst but you can test the different settings and see what works for you. The full documentation for options is on the StreamLink web site.

Examples

streamlink https://www.twitch.tv/rwxrob best  
  streamlink https://www.twitch.tv/rwxrob worst
  streamlink https://www.twitch.tv/rwxrob "720p,480p,best"