How to Download a Twitch VOD Before It's Deleted (Save It as MP4)

Updated: 2026-06-29 · Written by the vodfetch founder

Twitch quietly deletes past broadcasts after 7 to 60 days. Here's how to check when a VOD expires and save it as an MP4 with the Twitch Downloader before it's gone for good.

How long do Twitch VODs last before they're deleted?

Twitch does not keep your past broadcasts forever. By default, regular channels have their VODs automatically deleted after 7 days. Twitch Affiliates get 14 days, while Partners — and channels with a Prime Gaming or Turbo subscription — can have VODs stored for up to 60 days.

After the storage window ends, Twitch permanently removes the VOD and there is no built-in way to recover it. If a stream you want to keep is approaching its expiry date, the clock is genuinely ticking, so archiving it sooner rather than later is the safe move.

Note that Clips you create have no expiry at all, and Highlights are off that schedule too — though since a change announced in February 2025 and effective from 19 April 2025, Highlights and Uploads share a single 100-hour storage budget per channel. Full past broadcasts (the raw VODs) are the ones that expire on the schedule above.

How can I check when a Twitch VOD will be deleted?

If it's your own channel, open Creator Dashboard, then go to Content and select Video Producer. Each past broadcast shows its publish date, and Twitch will flag VODs that are about to expire so you know which ones to save first.

For someone else's VOD, you can estimate the deletion date from the stream date: add 7, 14, or 60 days depending on the streamer's account type. When in doubt, treat 7 days as the deadline and archive early.

As a channel owner, you should also enable Store Past Broadcasts so future streams are saved as VODs at all. Find it under Settings, then Stream, and toggle on Store past broadcasts. This only affects new streams going forward, not ones that already aired.

If it's someone else's channel, vodfetch's channel browser can help: paste the streamer's name and you'll see their recent VODs with an estimated days-left badge based on Twitch's retention rules above, so you can spot which ones to save first without guessing.

Why should you archive your Twitch VODs?

VODs are valuable. They're the raw material for YouTube re-uploads, highlight reels, TikTok and Shorts clips, tournament records, coaching review, and a personal backup of memorable moments. Once Twitch deletes the file, all of that is gone.

Downloading a VOD as an MP4 means you own a permanent local copy that plays in any video player and imports cleanly into editors like Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, or CapCut. Archiving is especially important before you delete content from your channel or if you ever lose access to your account.

How do I save a Twitch VOD as an MP4 with the Twitch Downloader?

The fastest way to rescue a VOD is the free Twitch Downloader. You paste the VOD's URL, the tool fetches the video, and you download it as a standard MP4 file, no software install or account login required.

Copy the VOD link from the address bar (it looks like twitch.tv/videos/1234567890), paste it into the Twitch Downloader, choose your quality, and save. The full step-by-step is below.

Responsible-use note: download VODs for personal use and only content you own or have permission to save, and always respect Twitch's Terms of Service and the original creator's copyright.

How to watch someone's past broadcasts (before they're gone)

Every channel keeps its recent past broadcasts under twitch.tv/<channel>/videos — that's the official way to watch past streams, and it works until each VOD hits its deletion window. Some streamers make past broadcasts subscriber-only, and highlights (which aren't on the deletion clock, though since 19 April 2025 they share a 100-hour storage cap with uploads) often outlive the full VODs.

If you'd rather see everything a channel currently offers in one place, type the channel's name into vodfetch's box: the channel browser lists its recent VODs with estimated expiry and its most-viewed clips — each with a download button.

Is there a Twitch archive or 'VOD finder' for deleted streams?

No. Once Twitch deletes a VOD, it is gone from Twitch — there is no official archive, and no tool (including this one) can recover it. Stats and tracker sites keep metadata about past streams (titles, dates, viewer counts), but not the video itself.

The realistic 'VOD finder' options are: the channel's own videos tab while the VOD still exists, the channel's highlights (no expiry date, but capped since 19 April 2025 at 100 hours of highlights and uploads per channel), and re-uploads the streamer published on YouTube. For anything you want to keep, the only reliable archive is the one you make yourself — before the timer runs out.

Triage: what to save first when the clock is short

Work in the order of what cannot be replaced: the video first, at a quality you can realistically finish rather than the largest one on offer. The quality list is sorted source first, then by descending bitrate, so the starred entry at the top is the source rendition and audio-only sits at the bottom. Each label carries a Mbit/s figure whenever the master playlist reports a bandwidth for that variant, and the size estimate beside the selector recalculates the moment you switch, so you can read what stepping down one rung actually saves instead of guessing. Chat and chapter markers are small and can wait until the video file is safe on disk.

The Format switch lives behind the More options link, and under time pressure the choice matters. TS writes each segment to the output as it arrives. MP4 holds the whole broadcast in the transmuxer and writes nothing until the last segment is in: the bar stops at 97 percent, the log reads "Converting to MP4…", and only then does the file appear. For a long past broadcast, TS is the lower-risk path. One caveat: TS keeps memory flat only when the browser can stream to disk, which is the next section's subject, and without that both formats end up buffered anyway. When a .ts finishes, the tool prints "Plays in VLC; for MP4 choose Format → MP4." Converting it afterwards with a stream copy is lossless, so taking TS now costs you nothing but a step later.

The Trim a section checkbox appears for past broadcasts only, not for clips and not while recording a live stream. The cut keeps whole segments: every segment that overlaps your window is included, so the saved file starts slightly before your start time and ends slightly after your end time. That is deliberate, because cutting mid-segment would mean re-encoding. Two behaviours are worth knowing before you type times in. If the end time is at or before the start, the range silently reverts to the full length rather than reporting an error. If the start time lies past the end of the video, the download stops with "No segments in range". Set the range roughly to get the file off Twitch, then trim to the exact frame in an editor.

Chat dies with the video, and the export is quick. The Chat button, also under More options, is shown for past broadcasts only; it pages through the comments 100 at a time, counts them as it goes, and saves "<id>_chat.txt" with one message per line, timestamped from the start of the broadcast like [1:02:33] Name: message. The Chapters button appears only when the broadcast actually carries chapter markers, and writes "<id>_chapters.txt" as one timestamped label per line. Both files are named after the numeric video id, while the video itself defaults to streamer_date_title_quality, so rename the text files while you still remember which broadcast they belong to.

Reading the size estimate before you commit

The figure beside the quality selector is an estimate, not a measurement: the variant's advertised bitrate divided by eight, multiplied by the number of seconds you have selected, which is why it tracks the trim window as you change it. It is shown for past broadcasts only, and only when the master playlist reports a bandwidth for that variant. When Twitch omits that value, the label carries no Mbit/s figure and no estimate appears — and, less obviously, neither size warning below can fire, because both test the same number.

A worked example. Take a four-hour broadcast whose source variant is advertised at 6 Mbit/s. Six million bits per second is 750,000 bytes per second, and 14,400 seconds of that is about 10.8 billion bytes. Sizes are formatted in binary units, so the tool displays that as roughly 10.1 GB. From the same rate, the MP4 threshold of 1.5 billion bytes is crossed after about 33 minutes of video, and the buffering threshold of 700 million bytes after about 15. Those two thresholds are decimal counts shown in binary units as well, so the dialogs quote about 1.4 GB and about 667 MB. A long broadcast at source quality will always trip at least one of them.

Both warnings are confirm dialogs, not caps. The first fires only when MP4 is selected and the estimate is above 1.5 billion bytes, and it suggests Format → TS or a shorter trim. The second fires only on browsers without the File System Access API, for non-live downloads above 700 million bytes, and points you at Chrome or Edge. Accept either and the download proceeds exactly as asked. They exist because the failure they predict, running out of memory, arrives at the end of a long transfer rather than at the start.

Which browser you use changes the mechanics. Where the File System Access API exists, the save dialog opens before the first segment is fetched and the file grows on disk as the download runs, which is why the 700 MB prompt never appears there. Everywhere else the file is assembled in memory and handed over at the end, and a very long broadcast can exhaust the tab. If the disk handle cannot be created after all, the log shows "Could not stream to disk — buffering in memory" and the download continues the slower way. Choose the browser before you start a large archive, not after.

How the days-left badge is calculated, and where it errs early

The days-left badge on the past-broadcast cards in the channel browser is computed in your browser from public metadata, and it is worth knowing exactly how. It takes the broadcast's publish date, measures its age in days, subtracts that from an assumed retention window — 60 days when Twitch reports the channel as Partner, 14 days when it reports an Affiliate, 7 days otherwise — and rounds the remainder up. It renders only when 14 days or fewer remain, and switches to "expires soon" once the estimate reaches zero.

So a card with no badge on the first page means more than two weeks of estimated headroom, not missing information. The estimate is deliberately conservative in one direction: the 60-day tier that Prime and Turbo bring is not modelled, so a non-affiliate channel with Prime linked is shown at 7 days when it may really have 60. Treat the number as arithmetic on a publish date rather than a deadline issued by Twitch. A streamer can delete a broadcast by hand at any time, and one who never switched on Store past broadcasts has nothing to expire in the first place.

The list is also scoped more narrowly than the channel's own videos tab. It requests 24 past broadcasts at a time, newest first, of the archive type only. Highlights and uploads are a different video type and are simply not in it; separately, Twitch keeps them off the deletion clock — since 19 April 2025 they share a 100-hour storage cap per channel instead — which is why an old stream that survives as a highlight is outside all of this arithmetic. A highlight still has an ordinary twitch.tv/videos/<id> address, so paste that link straight into the box and it loads like any other video.

One quirk changes how you read the page. The channel's retention tier is read once with the first page of results and reused for the rows added by Load more, so those cards carry the same estimate. They are not badge-free because they are safe; the information was never passed to those cards. Below the first 24, read the stream date printed on the card and apply the 7-day or 60-day rule yourself.

Where the message appears tells you what failed

Failures while analysing a link arrive as a browser alert; failures during a download are written into the progress log with a leading cross. That split tells you where you are before you read the words. Two alerts mean the video is out of reach, and they differ in how far the request got. "VOD unavailable (deleted, private or sub-only)" means Twitch's GraphQL endpoint returned no playback token at all, so the video is deleted, hidden or gated before any media request is made. "Usher 403 (sub-only/expired)" means a token was issued and the playlist server then refused it, the usual signature of subscriber-only content, while "Usher 404 (offline/not found)" means the id resolved to nothing. None of the three is worth retrying.

Two more alerts are about the text you pasted rather than the video. "Invalid URL" means the string could not be parsed as an address at all. "Unrecognized Twitch URL" means it parsed but carried no path to work with, which is what pasting the bare twitch.tv homepage produces. You do not need a full link: a bare video id of six digits or more works, a leading "v" is stripped automatically, and a plain channel name of 2 to 25 letters, digits or underscores is accepted too. A channel name loads the live stream if that channel is live, and falls back to the browsable list of past broadcasts and clips if it is not. An empty box produces no message at all, because Analyze simply puts the cursor back in the field.

"GraphQL HTTP <code>" is different in kind: the request to gql.twitch.tv itself failed, rather than the video being unavailable. Content blockers, strict privacy extensions and some corporate or VPN networks are the usual causes, and this is the one message genuinely worth retrying. In the log, "Segment failed" means one chunk exhausted four attempts, spaced roughly 300, 600, 900 and 1200 milliseconds apart. Note what follows: that error ends the whole download. There is no resume and no partial retry, so whatever had been written stays on disk as an incomplete file and a second run starts from the first segment. On a multi-hour archive, that is the risk you are managing when you pick a quality and a trim range.

The remaining log messages point at a setting rather than a fault. "No qualities available" means the playlist parsed but listed no variants. "MP4 conversion failed — choose Format → TS and retry." and "MP4 converter failed to start — choose Format → TS." both come from the transmuxer, which loads as a separate script only when MP4 is selected. One case is silent and worth recognising: if that script never loads at all, no error is raised and the download proceeds as TS instead, so you asked for MP4 and get a .ts that ends with the note "Plays in VLC; for MP4 choose Format → MP4."

The honest limits of a browser-side rescue

There is no login, and that is the single biggest limit. Requests carry Twitch's public web Client-ID with no user token attached, so subscriber-only past broadcasts cannot be fetched no matter what you subscribe to, because the tool never sees your account. The same absence explains missing high variants: some streams require an authenticated token for anything above 720p60, and without one those renditions are not in the playlist that comes back. That is a property of Twitch's access model, not something a downloader can work around.

Muted audio cannot be recovered either. When Twitch flags a stretch of a broadcast for copyrighted music, the mute is applied to the media Twitch serves, so every downloader receives the silence and there is no unmuted version to request. The picture is unaffected. If a broadcast matters to you as an archive, scrub through it in the Twitch player while it is still up, so you know what you are getting before your copy is the only one left.

There is no pause and no resume, and for a past broadcast there is no Stop button either: that control is labelled "Stop live recording" and appears only while recording a live stream, which in turn ends itself after three hours and has to be started again. A video download runs to completion or it does not, and reloading the page or closing the tab ends it and leaves an incomplete file to delete. Nothing is queued on our side to fall back on — media is relayed through a stateless worker purely because Twitch's CDN does not send the CORS headers a browser requires, the file is assembled in your browser, and no server-side job survives a closed tab. Start large archives when you can leave the tab alone.

How to download a Twitch video

1. 1

   Copy the VOD URL

   Open the Twitch VOD you want to keep and copy its full link (for example, twitch.tv/videos/1234567890) from your browser's address bar.

2. 2

   Open the Twitch Downloader

   Go to the Twitch Downloader tool in your browser; no account or installation is needed.

3. 3

   Paste the link

   Paste the VOD URL into the input field and let the tool load the video.

4. 4

   Choose your quality

   Select your preferred resolution, such as 1080p or 720p, depending on the file size you want.

5. 5

   Download as MP4

   Click download and save the VOD as an MP4 file to your device before Twitch's expiry deadline.

6. 6

   Verify and back up

   Play the downloaded MP4 to confirm it's complete, then store a copy in cloud or external storage for safekeeping.

Frequently asked questions

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