Guides
Twitch chat overlay with 7TV + BTTV + FFZ emotes
A free OBS chat overlay that actually renders the third-party emotes your community uses every day — 7TV animated emotes, BTTV, FFZ, plus all the standard Twitch ones — alongside real badges and per-role styling.
The problem with most chat overlays
Most free Twitch chat overlays render the words but miss the emotes — or only support the built-in Twitch ones. For a community that lives on 7TV emotes (or BTTV / FFZ), that turns every message into seemsgood, peepoLove, catKiss as raw text instead of the actual emote artwork. Misses the whole point.
The Chat Box overlay in the deutschmark toolset renders all four sources inline:
- Twitch globals + subscriber emotes — direct from the IRC message tags
- 7TV — animated WebP rendering, global + channel sets
- BTTV — global + channel sets
- FFZ — global + channel sets
Plus real Twitch badge artwork (broadcaster, partner, VIP, mod, subscriber tiers, artist, founder, etc.) — not flat colored squares.
Setup
- From the dashboard, open Chat Box.
- Click Create your first source. Copy the URL.
- Add it to OBS as a Browser Source. The recommended width depends on your scene — 480px wide × full canvas height is a typical "side rail" layout. Browser source walkthrough if you've never done this.
- On the tool page, set your Twitch channel name. The overlay auto-fetches your 7TV / BTTV / FFZ emote sets from each platform's public API the moment it loads.
Look + feel
Live-preview dashboard on the right shows a rolling sample of fake chatters across every Twitch role (broadcaster, partner, VIP, mod, sub tiers, artist, regulars) so you can dial in:
- Username color treatment — Twitch name, Title case, ALL CAPS
- Badge chip — flat or frosted glass behind the badges
- Name pill — wrap the username in its own matching pill
- Font size + family — Inter / Jost / Barlow / Bebas / others
- Alignment — left-anchored (default) or right-anchored mirror
- Animation — slide / fade / scale on new messages
- Auto-hide — fade old messages after N seconds or keep indefinitely
Filtering
Built-in toggles for the things most streamers want to hide on stream:
- Hide common chat bots (Nightbot, StreamElements, Streamlabs, etc.)
- Hide messages that start with
!(chat commands) - Per-username blacklist — "don't show these users"
- Per-word masking — "don't show these words", replaced with asterisks
How it gets the emotes
The Chat Box overlay does NOT require linking your 7TV / BTTV / FFZ account anywhere. It reads your channel name and queries each platform's public emote API:
7tv.io/v3/users/twitch/<channel-id>for your 7TV emote setapi.betterttv.net/3/cached/users/twitch/<channel-id>for BTTVapi.frankerfacez.com/v1/room/id/<channel-id>for FFZ
Plus the global emote sets from each. All public. Cached for a minute so a single chat message doesn't trigger four API calls per emote.
Honest comparison vs paid options
StreamElements chat overlay has 7TV support but it's gated behind their platform — you can't use just the chat overlay without setting up their loyalty system. OWN3D's chat widgets are subscription-only. The built-in Streamlabs OBS chat box doesn't support 7TV at all.
The deutschmark version covers all four emote sources, no platform login, no subscription, and the dashboard live-previews against real Twitch chat roles so the tuning loop is fast.
What you give up
No fancy custom CSS upload (yet). You get the dashboard knobs and that's it. For a team that wants pixel-perfect bespoke chat theming, paid options ship more freedom.
Pair with
Event list for subs / cheers / raids alongside the chat, Lurk peek for chatters going on lurk, and Emote rain for when chat goes wild.