Twitch video downloader

Every channel keeps its past broadcasts for a fixed period

When a stream ends, the recording is published on the channel's Videos tab. It is not kept indefinitely. Each channel has a retention period, and when a recording reaches the end of it the platform deletes the file.

That is why a link somebody sent you last season opens nothing today. The address is unchanged and the video behind it has been removed. Nothing on this page or anywhere else reaches a recording the host has deleted.

Twitch VODs expire after a retention window that depends on the channel and subscription rules. If you need a session offline, paste the VOD address while it still plays publicly.

Hours of 1080p video exceed the free 150 MB ceiling. Choose a lower row, a highlight, or a clip when you are on free use, or use Pro for larger files.

Working out how long you have left

The Videos tab shows how long ago each broadcast went out. Compare that against the channel's retention length and you have the window you are working inside, which for many channels is measured in days rather than months.

Two habits follow from that. Save a session in the week it happened rather than adding it to a list for later. And when a whole broadcast has already gone, look through the channel's clips and highlights for the same moment, because those are stored separately and survive the deletion.

Broadcasts reserved for paying subscribers

A streamer can restrict a recording to people who pay for a subscription to the channel. The page then checks for that subscription before it plays anything.

Vidzilla reads pages with no account signed in, so a sub-only recording shows our servers the gate instead of the video. Holding a subscription yourself does not change what they are shown, and an empty result in that situation is an accurate description of the page.

Hours of video against a 150 MB single-file ceiling

A broadcast runs for hours and the file is sized to match. Four hours at source quality is several gigabytes, and a marathon is larger again. Free use covers single files under 150 MB, which a full session passes inside its first few minutes of runtime.

The page states that position before the transfer starts rather than failing halfway through it. Pro removes the size ceiling, removes the three-downloads-a-day count and removes the ads. Whichever tier you are on, check the free space on the drive first, because a transfer that fills the disk leaves a file that will not open.

Deciding between the whole session and a section of it

Ask what you actually need before you spend hours of transfer on it.

• One moment from the stream: find the clip of it. Tens of megabytes, saved in seconds.
• A named segment the streamer published: take the highlight, which is shorter than the raw session and stays on the channel.
• The complete session, for editing or for archiving your own channel: take the broadcast at source quality and plan for gigabytes.
• A rewatch on a laptop: take a lower row of the broadcast, which is a fraction of the size and reads perfectly well.

Keeping a Twitch broadcast transfer alive

Hours of video take real minutes to move even on a fast line, and this tab has to stay open for all of them. Closing it ends the transfer the same way closing any browser tab ends a download in progress, and the next attempt starts from the beginning rather than resuming.

Run a transfer of this size on a home connection rather than a phone allowance, and leave the machine awake. Once the file is on your storage it is yours, it plays with no connection at all, and it stays there after the channel's retention period has removed the copy on the platform.

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

Related pages

• Sizes and disk space for a whole VOD
• Short excerpts that outlive the stream
• Sections a streamer published to keep
• Broadcasts still on air elsewhere
• How much room a saved video needs