How to Enable VODs and Create Highlights on Twitch

A common complaint: “I streamed for three hours and there’s no video on my channel.” Almost always, automatic archiving was switched off. It’s a single setting, and it only applies going forward — turning it on today does nothing for last night’s stream.

Turn on automatic archiving

1. Open your Creator Dashboard.
2. Go to Settings → Stream.
3. Find the Store past broadcasts option and enable it.

From then on, each stream you end produces a past broadcast on your channel’s Videos tab. It does not recover anything from before you flipped the switch.

Two things worth knowing while you’re in there:

• Archiving is off by default for some accounts, so don’t assume it’s on.
• Past broadcasts expire on a timer tied to your account type. That window is short — see VOD retention explained.

Create a highlight

Highlights are how you keep something permanently. They’re cut from an existing past broadcast, and they don’t expire the way the source does.

1. Creator Dashboard → Content → Video Producer.
2. Find the past broadcast you want and open the Highlight editor.
3. Drag the start and end handles to the section you want to keep.
4. Title it and save.

The highlight becomes its own video on your channel with its own URL, and the source broadcast is left untouched. You can cut several highlights from one broadcast.

Do this promptly. Once the parent broadcast expires, the material is gone and there is nothing left to highlight.

Also record locally

Platform settings are worth configuring, but the copy you actually control is the one on your own drive.

In OBS Studio, Settings → Output lets you record while streaming. A couple of choices that matter:

• Use a fragmented format (.mkv, or fragmented .mp4). A plain .mp4 that gets interrupted by a crash or power loss is often unrecoverable; .mkv survives it. You can remux to .mp4 afterwards from OBS’s File menu.
• Record at a higher bitrate than you stream. Your stream is compressed for delivery. Your local file doesn’t have to be, and if you plan to edit later you’ll want the headroom.
• Watch your disk space. Hours of high-bitrate video fills a drive faster than people expect. Check before a long session, not during.

A local recording plus a highlight covers you regardless of what Twitch’s retention policy does next.

Uploading video directly

You can also upload finished video files straight to your channel through Video Producer. Uploads behave like highlights — they persist rather than expiring.

This is the route for edited content: take a local recording, cut it properly in an editor, upload the result. It’s also how you’d restore an old broadcast you’d previously downloaded, if you want it back on the channel.

Quick troubleshooting

No video after streaming. Archiving was off. Turn it on; last night’s stream is not recoverable.

Video is there but muted in places. Audio recognition flagged copyrighted music in that segment. The live stream was unaffected; only the recording is muted. Playing licensed-for-stream music avoids this.

A VOD vanished earlier than expected. Check the expiry shown in Video Producer against your account type. Manual deletion and DMCA action are the other possibilities.

Highlight editor won’t open. The parent broadcast may have expired or already been deleted. Nothing to do at that point.

The habit worth building

Stream, then before you close the laptop: check the broadcast appeared, cut highlights of anything memorable, and confirm your local recording is where you expect it. Two minutes of work at the end of each session is what separates a channel with an archive from a channel that starts over every fortnight.

If you’d rather keep the full broadcast as a file, downloading the VOD is straightforward — just do it while the video still exists.