How to Raid on Twitch (and Why Raids Grow Channels)

Updated: 2026-07-06 · Written by the vodfetch founder

A raid sends your live audience to another channel when you end your stream. Here's how to start one, the etiquette that makes raids work, and how to use them to grow.

What a Twitch raid is

A raid moves your live viewers to another channel at the end of your broadcast. Instead of your stream simply ending, everyone lands in the target channel's chat together, usually announced with a raid banner. For the receiving streamer it's a burst of new viewers; for you it's a way to end streams with a gift instead of a goodbye.

Raids are a native, free Twitch feature — and the closest thing small streamers have to a discovery engine they control themselves.

How to start a raid

While you're live, open your Stream Manager. In Quick Actions, click 'Raid Channel', type the target channel's name and confirm. Alternatively, type /raid channelname directly into your own chat.

A countdown starts and your viewers see the raid banner. When it executes — or when you click 'Raid now' — everyone who stayed is carried over to the target channel. End your stream after the raid lands, not before.

Raid settings and safety

In your creator settings you control who may raid you: everyone, only friends and teammates, or nobody — and you can block specific channels. If an incoming raid brings a rough wave, moderators can temporarily switch chat to Follower-only or Emote-only mode while it passes.

Raid etiquette that actually builds relationships

Raid channels around your own size or slightly smaller — twenty viewers landing in a five-viewer stream change someone's night; the same twenty in a five-thousand-viewer stream evaporate. Stay in the target's chat for a few minutes, introduce your community, and don't ask for anything back.

Consistency compounds. Raiding the same handful of compatible channels builds real raid circles, and that repetition — adjacent communities meeting again and again — is where the growth effect actually comes from.

After the raid: the stream is still worth keeping

Great raids usually cap great streams, and the broadcast itself expires like every VOD — after 7 to 60 days depending on your status. If you want to keep the stream, or cut the raid moment into a clip for socials, save it as MP4 first — vodfetch does it free, in your browser.

Scouting a raid target with the channel browser

Type a bare channel name into vodfetch — 2 to 25 letters, digits or underscores is read as a channel rather than a URL, though a bare run of six or more digits is treated as a video ID instead — and what happens next depends on whether that channel is live. If it is, you land straight in the download panel with the stream's quality list ready to record. If it is not, the tool falls back to a channel browser: a "Recent VODs & clips" grid holding the last 24 past broadcasts, newest first, with a "Load more" button that pages through 24 at a time, and a "Popular clips" grid underneath.

Each VOD card carries title, category, duration and date — not a view count — and the query asks for past broadcasts only, so highlights and uploads never appear in it. Cards near the end of Twitch's retention window get an estimated expiry badge, "~12d left (est.)" and so on, or "expires soon" once the estimate has run out; it is drawn only in the final 14 days. Read it as an estimate, because it assumes 60 days for Partners, 14 for Affiliates and 7 for everyone else, and it cannot see a Prime or Turbo subscription that would make it 60. Clicking any card drops that URL into the input and analyses it immediately.

The clips grid is the faster read on a channel's culture: twelve clips per period, ordered by view count, with Today, This week, This month and All time buttons. All time shows what a channel is known for; This week shows what its chat is reacting to right now. If the top clips of the week are a tone your own community would not enjoy, that is a mismatch no size comparison catches.

Keeping the raid moment from your own VOD

Your raid sits in the last minutes of your past broadcast, and that recording is on a clock: 7 days on a normal account, 14 for Affiliates, 60 for Partners (and for Prime or Turbo channels). Clips never expire, and highlights are off that clock too — though since 19 April 2025 they share a combined 100-hour storage budget with uploads — which is why clipping the moment the same night is the safer plan and the download the backup. Expect one thing about the file: Twitch's raid banner, like the chat column, is drawn by the web player around the video rather than encoded into it, so it is not in what you download. A raid alert you composited in OBS is in the pixels, because it went through your encoder.

The Trim panel appears only for past broadcasts — never for clips, never while recording live. Its scrubber loads Twitch's own seek-preview storyboard, so hovering the track shows a thumbnail of the stream at that point; for a raid, where you rarely know the exact timestamp, scrubbing the last stretch until the scene changes beats guessing in the time fields. As you drag, the panel updates the selected range and a size estimate. That estimate is the rendition's bitrate divided by eight, times the selected seconds — arithmetic, not a measurement — and it stays blank when the master playlist reports no BANDWIDTH for the quality you picked.

Trimming keeps whole segments instead of re-encoding: the filter keeps every segment whose end is past your in-point and whose start is before your out-point, so the cut expands outward at both ends. You always get slightly more than you asked for and never less, which is the right failure for a reaction you do not want clipped short, but do not expect frame-exact edges. A range that falls outside the recording produces "No segments in range" and nothing is written.

There is a URL shortcut worth knowing. The page reads ?url= (or ?u=) to prefill the input, ?go=1 to analyse on load, and ?t= to preselect a range: a timestamp in Twitch's 1h2m3s form, or plain seconds, opens the options panel, switches Trim on and selects from that point to sixty seconds later. It applies to past broadcasts only, and only when the timestamp falls inside the recording. Note the timestamp while the raid is happening and the selection is already sitting on it by the time the VOD finishes loading.

Recording the raid live, and why that file is a .ts

Live capture is the other half of this. Point the tool at a channel that is currently streaming and it records forward from that moment, and two things follow directly from the code. The MP4 transmuxer is skipped for live explicitly, so the output is .ts whatever the Format switch says — an audio-only quality gives .aac — and the run closes with "Plays in VLC; for MP4 choose Format → MP4." Trim is unavailable as well: you get exactly the window you sat through, and the log says as much at the start with "Recording live → TS… press Stop to finish".

While recording, the tool re-fetches the live playlist every target-duration seconds — the value Twitch publishes in the playlist, falling back to two — and keeps a set of segment URLs it has already written so nothing is duplicated. It stops on its own when the playlist signals the end of the stream, and after eight consecutive refreshes that either fail or bring no new segments it prints "Stream ended or unreachable." and closes the file. That is what you see shortly after a raider ends their broadcast, so recording the outgoing channel captures the run-up and nothing more. The arrival happens on the receiving channel's stream; that is the one to record if you want the landing.

There is a hard three-hour ceiling per recording. The loop stops itself and logs "⏱ Live recording stopped automatically after 3 hours (abuse protection). Start it again for another 3 hours." Nothing raises it. Before starting the second recording, press Analyze again: the segment list from the first analysis is cached, and live segment URLs may have aged out of Twitch's window by then, so a fresh analysis is what gets the recorder a current playlist. Expect a short seam between the two files rather than a frame-exact join. For a raid you are usually capturing the tail of someone's stream, so the ceiling rarely bites.

Clip, GIF and chat log: the other three ways to keep it

Clips take a different path entirely. A clip is already one finished file on Twitch's side, so it is fetched and saved as .mp4 by a routine that never touches the transmuxer — which is why the MP4/TS switch has no effect on clips, and why a clip download cannot fail with a conversion error. A deleted clip gives "Clip not found or deleted"; a clip that comes back without playable qualities or a signature gives "Clip not available". For sharing a raid moment, this is the least fragile route.

For a short reaction loop, the GIF button is always available on a clip, and on a past broadcast only when Trim is on and the selection is 15.5 seconds or shorter. The encoder runs at 12 frames per second, scales down to a maximum width of 480 pixels (never up), and quantises each frame to a 256-colour palette. From a VOD it builds the trimmed section as MP4 first, so it does need the transmuxer — "MP4 converter unavailable" means that step failed — and it honours your exact in-point by offsetting inside the first segment, which the plain MP4 export cannot. From a clip there is no in-point at all: it starts at the beginning and takes at most the first 15 seconds.

Chat exports as a plain text file named after the video ID, "<id>_chat.txt", one message per line as [12:34] Name: message, with the hour shown only past the first hour. It is always the whole VOD: it starts at offset zero, pages through Twitch's comment API a hundred messages at a time up to a ceiling of 300,000, and ignores the Trim range completely. There is no marker for the raid itself — the tell is the timestamp you noted plus a sudden run of unfamiliar names. An empty result raises "No chat available for this VOD". The Chapters button, which only shows up when the VOD actually has markers, writes a second text file with one timestamped line per marker; those markers are Twitch's category changes, so they are good for finding where a variety stream switched games and useless for locating a raid.

When it does not work: the message and what it means

"VOD unavailable (deleted, private or sub-only)" is the most common wall and it is structural. The tool asks Twitch's public GraphQL endpoint with the public web Client-ID and no login at all, so anything gated behind a subscription is out of reach, and a past broadcast that aged out is not coming back. Both are arguments for clipping a raid while it is still live rather than trusting the recording to be there later.

The early failures are input. An empty field gives "Enter a Twitch URL"; text that will not parse as a URL gives "Invalid URL". "Unrecognized Twitch URL" is rarer than it looks, because any first path segment is read as a channel name — in practice you only see it for a bare domain with no path. A misspelt channel name does not error either; it falls through to the channel browser, which reports "Channel not found." when no such user exists. "No qualities available" means Twitch returned a playlist with no usable renditions, and "Usher 403 (sub-only/expired)" or "Usher 404 (offline/not found)" means the playlist server refused before that point.

Mid-download messages point elsewhere. "Segment failed" means one range request was retried four times, with the wait growing each attempt, and still came back empty. "Playlist HTTP <code>" and "GraphQL HTTP <code>" mean Twitch itself answered with an error, and retrying a minute later usually clears them. The two size prompts are confirmations rather than caps, and they only ever appear for past broadcasts because the estimate needs a VOD bitrate: one above roughly 1.5 GB when converting to MP4, one above roughly 700 MB in a browser without the File System Access API, where the file is buffered in memory instead of streamed to disk. "Could not stream to disk — buffering in memory" is the related warning when the save dialog exists but fails.

Two more are worth expecting. "MP4 conversion failed — choose Format → TS and retry." means the transmuxer gave up, which the tool's own large-file warning attributes to very large VODs; the TS file holds the same video and plays in VLC. And if your raid outro had music, the audio may simply be silent: Twitch mutes VOD sections flagged for copyrighted audio and serves them already muted, so every downloader receives the same silence and the MP4/TS choice makes no difference.

How to download a Twitch video

1. 1

   Open the Stream Manager

   While you're live, go to your dashboard's Stream Manager.

2. 2

   Click 'Raid Channel' (or type /raid name)

   Pick a live channel — ideally similar size and compatible content.

3. 3

   Confirm and let the countdown run

   Your viewers see the raid banner; when it executes they move over together.

4. 4

   Land with your community

   Say hi in the target chat, hang out a few minutes, then end your own stream.

Frequently asked questions

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