How to download deleted Twitch vods

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I’ve seen a fair number of people asking about Twitch streamers who don’t save their vods so here’s a short tutorial on how to download a stream once it has been deleted.

This way you don’t need to spam their profile with burp clips and can just trim the stream once it has been saved on your machine.

Twitch Recover is pretty straight forward. You can watch a YT tutorial on how to install yt-dlp and ffmpeg

  • Get m3u8 link

First you need to go to TwitchTracker.com.

Let’s say you want to grab Amouranth’s latest stream.

You go to the stream page and copy the stream link..

Then you go to TwitchRecover and you press 5, enter, 1, enter.

After that you paste the twitchrecover link and press enter.

You will need to select a quality: press 1, enter for Source quality.

Now you have the m3u8 link

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11010×400 65.5 KB

Don’t try to download streams with TwitchRecover, because at least from my experience you might end up with a 80GB file on your machine of a stream that should be 5-7 GB at most and the download will be very very slow.

  • Download stream with yt-dlp

Go to the yt-dlp folder, type “cmd” in the address bar and use this command:

yt-dlp https://d1m7jfoe9zdc1j.cloudfront.net/488a46ff0ea7107ee515_amouranth_47592246413_1670529177/chunked/index-dvr.m3u8

After you press enter the stream should start downloading.

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2782×208 28.1 KB

If it doesn’t and you get an error like the one below, you can use ffmpeg instead.

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  • Download stream with ffmpeg

Open cmd the same way you did for yt-dlp and type this command:

ffmpeg -i https://d1m7jfoe9zdc1j.cloudfront.net/488a46ff0ea7107ee515_amouranth_47592246413_1670529177/chunked/index-dvr.m3u8 -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc amouranth_47592246413_1670529177.mp4

Sometimes the stream will have muted parts and you’ll get a similar error on ffmpeg, but the stream will keep downloading and skipping over muted parts (as opposed to yt-dlp).

6 Likes
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Just a nitpick, I think the command should start with ffmpeg and not yt-dlp. ie: just ffmpeg -i https://d1m7jfoe9zdc1j.cloudfront.net/488a46ff0ea7107ee515_amouranth_47592246413_1670529177/chunked/index-dvr.m3u8 -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc amouranth_47592246413_1670529177.mp4

Also, shameless plug, but for those who happen to be using the latest version of chat_reader; If you’re searching through twitch channels (chat_reader twitch channel somechannel) you can add --recover to automatically go through all the past streams on a channel and present m3u8 urls if they’re available.
Example: chat_reader twitch channel --recover amouranth

2 Likes
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Hmm for some reason the deleted vod recover feature always causes the program to crash on my end. Been using Twitch Recover frequently throughout the year and everything involving available streams works just fine(downloading and such). But for recovering deleted/unsaved vods I type 5, enter, 1, enter, stream analytic link, enter and then the program immediately closes out instead of going to the quality options. I just figured Twitch started cracking down harder on the way they store/delete vods and instead of hiding them away in a secret database like they use to, they wipe them clean from the site asap. Looked at the comments on the Twitch Recover download site and it seems quite a few folks have been having this same issue. Its still working for some of you though so maybe i’m missing something.

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Could you PM an example link so I can check if it works on my end? I’ve had this issue from time to time, but it usually works after submitting it again a few times.

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The project was abandoned by the author in favor of a rewrite (still in development). It’s not twitch themselves cracking down on it (to my knowledge). Websites like twitchtracker don’t want programs scraping their information and have been changing the way they present information to make it more difficult.

1 Like
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Oh I see. Hopefully they’re able to create an updated version soon. Twitch may have still changed at least something slightly on their end though cause earlier last year I remember it was possible to still watch streams that had been deleted if a window was open with the vod. The vod would still be watchable for at least a day after deletion so long as you had a window open with the vod playing before it was deleted. Ever since late last year it seems as soon as a Twitch stream is removed it won’t be viewable and will automatically crash if it is somehow being viewed after deletion. There was also a website(forgot what it was called) that use to allow recently deleted vods to be viewed but once Twitch did that update the website stopped being able to produce old deleted vods properly and was eventually taken down. That’s why I figured Twitch made some sort of changes to their vod storage. Could be a mixture of both Twitch and the analytic sites though.

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I’m bumping this thread because I’m curious about trying to get twitch streams that were deleted probably from around 2020. Do these methods still work or is there a whole new method. Thanks for the help in advance

1 Like