Twitch highlight downloader

A highlight is a section the streamer chose to keep

After a broadcast ends, a streamer can mark part of it, or the whole of it, and publish that section as a highlight. The highlight is saved as its own item on the channel and is not governed by the retention period that removes ordinary past broadcasts.

That makes a highlight the deliberate archive of a channel. A tournament run, a first playthrough or a charity hour survives there long after the raw session that produced it has been deleted.

Highlights are not the full VOD and not a viewer-made clip. The streamer marks a span of the broadcast and publishes that span under its own address. That address is what you paste when you want the curated section rather than hours of surrounding stream.

Runtime still scales with how long that section is. A forty-minute highlight is a large file compared with a thirty-second clip, and the free 150 MB ceiling matters on high-quality rows.

The address a highlight is published under

A highlight lives in the same part of the site as past broadcasts and carries a plain run of digits identifying it. There is no separate word in the path announcing that the item is a highlight rather than a raw recording.

Open the Videos tab on the channel and switch the filter to highlights, then open the one you want and copy the address from the browser bar. The channel address on its own holds a list of items and no single file, so pasting that returns nothing.

Runtime, and the megabytes that follow from it

Highlights vary enormously in length. Some are a three-minute finish. Others are a five-hour session the streamer kept whole, which is the same size as the broadcast it was taken from.

File size follows runtime in a straight line at a given quality. Ten minutes at source quality is a few hundred megabytes, and an hour runs into gigabytes. The results list prints the real figure for the item you pasted, so the decision is made with a number in front of you rather than a guess.

Highlights the streamer later takes down

A highlight stays until its owner removes it, and owners do remove them. A channel rebrand, a takedown over background music, or a simple tidy-up all end with items disappearing from the Videos tab.

Once it is gone the platform stops serving the file and Analyze reports nothing for that address. There is no recovery route from this page or any other. A highlight that matters to you is worth saving in the week you find it rather than the year after.

Reading the rows on a highlight page

Analyze reports the encodings the page is serving, each with a height and a size in megabytes. Source quality matches what went out live and is the largest row. Below it sit the standard heights the platform produced when the broadcast was processed.

Take source quality when you are cutting the material into something else, because the extra bitrate survives a re-encode. Take a 720p row when you want to rewatch a session, and accept a file a fraction of the size for a picture that reads perfectly well on a laptop.

The 150 MB ceiling and a long highlight

Free use covers single files under 150 MB, and a highlight of more than a few minutes at source quality passes that figure quickly. The page states the position before the transfer begins rather than failing partway through. Pro removes the ceiling, removes the three-a-day count and removes the ads.

Long transfers need the tab left open until they end, and they need the disk space checked first, because a transfer that runs out of room leaves a file that will not play. Save what you have the right to save: the broadcast belongs to the streamer, and a highlight is their own edit of it.

Keep this tab open until the browser finishes writing the file for twitch highlight downloader. A prepared file only waits a short time before it expires from the temporary store.

Related pages

• Saving a raw past broadcast
• Short excerpts cut by viewers
• Retention periods on a channel
• Checking disk space before a large transfer
• Choosing between source quality and 720p