Twitch VOD Downloader

Past broadcast, highlight or clip?

Twitch stores three different things and it is worth knowing which one you have, because the link shape tells you. A past broadcast is the automatic recording of a whole stream, and a highlight is a permanent excerpt a streamer exported from one. Both sit at twitch.tv/videos/ followed by a numeric ID, and both belong on this page.

A clip is different — a few seconds someone captured with the clip button, stored as its own file at clips.twitch.tv/…. Those download by a much faster route, so they have their own page: the Twitch clip downloader.

Downloading a full broadcast

Open the channel you want, switch to the Videos tab, and open the broadcast. Copy the address — it will look like twitch.tv/videos/2839187104 — and paste it into the box at the top of this page. Press Download and the rendition list appears with a size estimate next to each one.

That is the whole flow. Unlike a desktop Twitch video downloader you have to install and keep updated, this runs in the browser you already have open, and unlike a recorder it never re-captures the stream — the original file is what you end up with.

Those estimates matter more here than anywhere else on the site. A three-hour stream at 1080p60 is comfortably several gigabytes, and the estimate is your warning before you commit to the transfer. Picking 720p roughly halves it with very little visible cost on gameplay footage.

Pulling one moment out of a long stream

Most people do not want six hours. Press Trim, then set a start and end time by typing timecodes or dragging the two slider handles. The summary line updates with the selected length and an estimated size for that range specifically.

This is not a crop applied after downloading everything. The broadcast is split into roughly ten-second segments, and only the segments covering your range are ever requested — so a two-minute cut out of a six-hour stream transfers about two minutes' worth of data.

One quirk to expect: your end time is exact, but the start snaps backwards to the nearest keyframe, which can be up to ten seconds earlier than you asked. That is a deliberate trade. Cutting precisely on a non-keyframe would mean rebuilding the frames in between, which forces a full re-encode and throws away the lossless copy this whole page is built on. A few extra seconds at the front is the cheaper price.

Why a broadcast shows a progress bar

Clips are already MP4 files sitting on Twitch's CDN. Past broadcasts are not — they are stored as HLS, meaning hundreds or thousands of small segments plus a playlist describing their order. There is no MP4 on Twitch's servers for a VOD, so one has to be built.

That assembly happens in your browser. Segments are fetched several at a time, put back into playlist order, and written into an MP4 container. It is a container change, not a conversion: the H.264 video and AAC audio are copied across exactly as Twitch served them. No quality is lost, and no server in the middle re-compresses your video. The progress bar is that assembly, which is also why the tab needs to stay open until it finishes.

Which browser to use for a multi-hour VOD

Use Chrome or Edge for anything long. They support the File System Access API, so the MP4 is written to the file you chose as it is built and only a small buffer is ever held in memory. A six-hour broadcast is then limited only by free disk space, and you are asked where to save before the download starts.

Firefox and Safari have no equivalent, so the file has to be assembled in memory and handed over at the end. That is fine for a highlight or a short stream, but a multi-gigabyte archive can exhaust the tab. On those browsers either trim to a shorter range, drop to a lower rendition, or switch browser for the big ones. You will get a warning before starting anything likely to run out of room.

Twitch VOD download quality and 60fps archives

Every rendition Twitch published for the broadcast is listed, best first, with the top one marked Source. Where the streamer broadcast at 60fps you will see renditions labelled accordingly, such as 1080p60, and picking one keeps that framerate intact.

Worth knowing: renditions below source were encoded by Twitch during the stream, not by us. Choosing 720p gives you Twitch's own 720p, downloaded as-is — it is never a fresh re-compression of the source performed here.

Download before the VOD expires

Past broadcasts do not stay up forever. Depending on the channel's status, Twitch keeps them somewhere between 7 and 60 days, after which they are deleted and no tool can recover them. Highlights are the exception and persist until the streamer removes them.

If a broadcast matters to you, download it early rather than bookmarking it. Our guide to VOD retention breaks the windows down, and enabling VODs and highlights covers the settings streamers need for archives to exist at all.

Sub-only, deleted and live broadcasts

Only public content is reachable. Subscriber-only past broadcasts require an entitlement tied to a paying account, and that check happens on Twitch's side before any video is served — so a sub-only VOD returns an error rather than a download.

A stream that is still running has no finished recording to hand over. Wait for the broadcast to end and the archive to appear on the Videos tab, then download that. If a streamer has archiving switched off, nothing is published and there is nothing to fetch.