How To Download Twitch VOD Videos

If you’re a regular Twitch goer, then there’s likely been times where you’ve wished you could download broadcasts as VODs for viewing later. If you’re not at home because of work or are traveling, it makes it difficult to keep up with your favorite broadcaster’s streams. That’s why downloading Twitch streams can be so nice — once they stream, download them to your PC and catch them later. Unfortunately, Twitch itself doesn’t always support ways for folks to download anything other than their own streams, and only for a certain amount of days after the original stream took place.

That said, if you want to get around Twitch’s blockade on that and download an old Twitch stream once and for all, be sure to follow along below — we’ll show you how!

Downloading your own videos

Like we mentioned earlier, Twitch makes it pretty easy to download your own broadcasts. As a general rule, and depending on your account level, you should be able to download your broadcasts between 14 and 60 days from the original broadcast or stream. After that duration is up though, those broadcasts are automatically deleted and can’t be downloaded or watched ever again.

To even begin downloading your own broadcasts, you need to enable auto-archiving on your account. It’s pretty simple to do this.

1. Head to the Twitch home page. Next, click on the drop-down menu located at the top-right corner of the screen, and select the Settings menu link/icon/
2. Next, select the Channels & Videos option. Then, scroll down to the Channel Settings section.
3. Finally, check mark the box that says Automatically archive my broadcasts.

Once you’ve completed that, your broadcasts are now being archived for a period of time selected by Twitch. As we mentioned, this can be between 14 and 60 days, allowing you to download your broadcasts within that time period.

Now, we just need to download our own videos. It’s easy:

• Head back over to the Twitch main page, and then from the main drop-down, select the Video Manager option.
• This is the section where all of your broadcasts are saved. You should see, under each thumbnail, an option that says Download. Click the VODs that you want to download, and they’ll save to your computer. Depending on the length of the VOD, this could take some time — after all, hours long videos can take much longer than smaller streams.

That’s all there is to it for downloading your own videos. Downloading videos from other streamers on the other hand, are a little more difficult.

Download broadcasts from others

To download a video off of Twitch, you have to use a third-party application. That application is called Twitch Leecher. With his program on your computer, it will allow you to download Twitch videos made by any broadcaster on the platform. You can grab it from the Twitch Leecher Github page for your computer. You’ll need to select the appropriate version for your system.

After Twitch Leecher is installed, you’ll need to open the application. This can be done through a simple search in the Start bar on your taskbar, or you can look under the Recently Added section within the Start menu.

With Twitch Leecher open, click on the option that says Search. Keep the program open, but now we’ll need to open your browser.

Now, open your Internet Browser of choice, and head to www.twitch.tv.

Next, find the Twitch streamer’s broadcast page that you want to download a video from.

On your Twitch streamer’s of choice profile page, click on the Videos link.

Find the video that you want to download, right-click the video with your mouse, and select the option that says Copy Link.

Let’s head back into Twitch Leecher. Click on the Urls tab, and then paste the video link into the white text field by pressing the shortcut code Ctrl + V. Or, right-click on the text box and click Paste. Then, press Search. Twitch Leecher will then use the URL to find the broadcast.

The Twitch video you searched for should show up within Twitch Leecher, and then you should see a Download button in its lower-right corner. Click the button to start the process.

Finally, the next screen you’ll choose some details about your video. Choose the quality/resolution, the folder where the video needs to be downloaded, and then finally, choose a custom file name. If you want, you can also choose start and end points for the video, which is helpful with broadcasts that are a few hours long. Broadcasts that are a few hours long can be massive in size, so this start and end point option allows you to only choose the highlights that you want to see.

Once those options are set, press Download. This may take some time depending on the length and size of the video, as several hour videos can often be gigabytes in size.

 

Verdict

As you can see, it’s quite easy to download a video on Twitch, even if using a third-party program. By following the steps above, you should be able to download a video in a jiffy!