How To Archive Your Broadcasts in Twitch

With all the content available on Twitch, it isn’t surprising that users want to take some of their content offline, either to watch later or to work with it in a video editing program.

Fortunately, depending on your membership level, you can archive your videos for a fixed period of time after broadcast. If you’re a free user, you can archive your Twitch videos for 14 days. If you’re a Twitch Prime user you can archive your videos for up to 60 days. You can also download your videos to keep forever.

Let’s take a quick look at archiving broadcasts on Twitch

The Difference Between Clips and Videos

First, you should understand the differences between Twitch clips and videos.

Streamers have to enable the ability for their streams to be archived — it’s not automatically enabled by default. Once you or your favorite streamer has enabled the ability to save their streams to their own channel, there are still limits on how that content is saved.

Once you or another user has enabled auto-archiving on their videos, their videos will appear saved on their page for 14-days for regular streamers. If you have Amazon Prime, you can upgrade to Twitch Prime to gain access to 60-day archives; alternatively, if you’ve been made a Twitch Partner, your streams will also archive for sixty days.

Highlights are different than videos. If a highlight is saved to your account, it lasts forever, as opposed to just for the 14 or 60 days on standard accounts.

That said, highlights are much longer than a clip, often taking up full videos at a time. Meanwhile, clips are only up to sixty seconds long, typically ranging from 30 to 60 seconds depending on how the content was edited. Highlights are made by the creator or specifically-chosen editors, but clips can be made by anyone looking to save content to their own page.

Clips from other streamers that you create save directly to your own account inside your clips manager, which allows you to save content right to your own page.

Overall, archived videos on Twitch are a bit confusing. Between videos, highlights, and clips, there are three distinct tiers of content saved to a streamer’s page.

How to Archive Your Broadcasts in Twitch

Twitch’s focus on live broadcasting means that they tend to keep the experience focused on what’s currently live, as opposed to older broadcasts. So, in order to ensure you keep your broadcasts archived on your account, here’s what you need to do.

1. Log in to Twitch and select Settings from your dashboard.
2. Check the box next to Store Past Broadcasts under Stream Preferences.

This will enable that storage option for your videos. We need to do this first in order to be able to archive your broadcasts in Twitch. You can go ahead and broadcast now and your videos will automatically be archived for 14 or 60 days.

Viewing Archived videos in Twitch

Once you have a bunch of videos you have broadcast, you will want to know where to go to find them, right?

Fortunately, they are available in your Twitch Dashboard like most other settings. You can then access the Videos menu in the left pane of the page and you should see a list of all the videos you have archived.

Downloading Clips from Twitch

If you’ve found a clip that you want to download, there are a few steps you can take to do just that.

While Twitch no longer allows you to download clips directly from the website, there is a workaround you can use that involves using an ad blocker like AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin. For this article, we used uBlock Origin on Google Chrome.

To start, save a clip you want to download to your own account or find the clip on someone else’s page. This only works with clips, so make sure that the segment you’re downloading is sixty seconds in length or shorter.

Start by opening your ad blocker’s settings on your device by right-clicking on the icon in your browser and selecting options. This will open a tab for your blocker right inside your browser, where you can edit or save settings at will.

Find the “My Filters” setting in your ad blocker. For uBlock Origin users, it’s the “My Filters” tab; for AdBlock Plus users, it’s under the advanced menu options. You’ll then need to create two custom filters for two separate links at Twitch.

Once you’re in the custom filters tab, copy and paste both of these links into your blocker’s filters editor:

• clips.twitch.tv##.player-overlay
• player.twitch.tv##.player-overlay

Apply your changes and leave the settings page. Refresh Twitch and find the clip you want to download. Any time you find a clip, you can now right-click the clip inside the video player and select “Save Video As…”

This will download the video to your computer as an mp4 file. These clips download at their full resolutions and look great for playback, editing, and uploading.

Again, if you try to do this on a video that isn’t a clip, you’ll run into issues performing the task, so make sure to stick only with proper clips and not the actual videos, highlights, and archives that can be multiple hours long.

Export Videos Directly to YouTube

You can also export Twitch videos straight to YouTube.

You will need to have your Twitch and YouTube accounts linked before you try this in order for it to work. To link the accounts, go to Settings in Twitch and Connections. Check the box next to YouTube Export Archives and add your account.

1. Navigate to Video Manager from the menu to access the list of videos you have created.
2. Select Past Broadcasts and More.
3. Select Export. Select a title and any settings you want to add.
4. Set the privacy options, Public or Private.
5. Select the Export button.

Depending on the time of day, this process can take a little while. What you end up with is a video accessible through YouTube that will stay there for as long as you need it to.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re looking to download small clips of your favorite streamers, or you want to save your own full six-hour streams for storing offline, it’s pretty easy to download content from Twitch.

While we’d love to see an official offline playback and download option for Twitch Prime users added sometime in the future, as long as you have a Windows PC lying around your house, it’s easier than ever to save Twitch streams right to your PC once they’ve been put online.