You just finished a stream full of funny moments, interesting discussion, or a great final stand in a battle royale. But what happened to all that content? Did it just end up in the void or did you make sure to save it for later?
Some streaming services like Twitch.TV have time limits for how long they’ll hold onto your past livestream. If you want those moments to live on, you’ll need to archive them somehow. And in some cases, videos are simply unavailable after the stream due to copyright reasons. If you don’t enable storage of those past streams, it’s been too long, or you listened to some music on stream by accident, those moments could just be history.
If you stream right onto YouTube, and you’re already set as those will automatically be archived as a regular video, as long as you weren’t doing a subathon for over 12 hours. If all you want is for your streams to live on, you’re good to go.
While most might think the value of a livestream is only in it being live and the interaction that comes with it, the truth is that a recorded livestream can have a lot of value after the fact.
You can upload them as-is somewhere like a YouTube channel for your viewers to find later if they missed it live. This is certainly the easiest option for repurposing.
You can also edit these streams into clips or moments for sharing on social media like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels. This can draw in new viewers to catch you live later.
Finally, you can take that livestream, or multiple, and turn them into complete compilations, full of all those great moments to post as a fully featured long form video. Complete with music, sound effects, and maybe even a structure of a story across a few streams.
Saving these streams and uploading them can also be a great resource for your community to come up with their own edits of moments.
Of course, you can often download the stream right from the website, but depending on factors like the music being played, internet drops, and voice chat you’ll end up having parts of your stream muted, looking choppy, pixelated, or in totally different pieces.
And in that case of Voice Chat, by separating that during recording you’ll have better control over what shows up if or when you decide to create highlights. By far the best option for saving your streams is saving them directly on your computer while you stream.
One aspect we didn’t talk about yet is quality. For you YouTube streamers, all content that goes on YouTube is converted once. You upload a video to their servers, and they will process the video into quite a few different formats. This also happens with livestreams. You know those formats as the quality options on the video-menu like 144p, 480p, 1080p, et cetera. Each time this happens quality is lost. If you plan on re-editing your streams or making highlights, you will infact have the highest quality by saving your streams locally like we explained above, then editing, and then finally uploading to YouTube. If you were to download them directly from YouTube, you’d be working with a lower quality version.
If you are streaming with OBS Studio, it’s super simple to save a copy of the stream automatically. Go into Settings, on the general tab enable “Automatically record when streaming”. Next, pick a place for OBS Studio to save the file. Go into the Output tab, and under Recording Path, pick a folder. Make sure to change the Format to Fragmented MP4 or Hybrid MP4. Click on OK.
Now when you click on Stream, OBS Studio saves a copy of your stream to your computer. Without any risk of losing it due to copyright, internet dropouts, and the like.
So, if you’re just starting streaming, this is great way to save those moments. But what if you’ve already been streaming?
Archiving Twitch Broadcasts:
A great tool for those streaming on Twitch is TwitchLeecher-DX (https://github.com/schneidermanuel/TwitchLeecher-Dx)
You will need to sign in with your Twitch account. Once you do you can download your streams directly from Twitch for editing or saving later and typically in the original quality.
Archiving YouTube Broadcasts:
This will download a usable version of your stream, typically around 720p. However to get the highest quality you may need to use a third party tool or service. We highly recommend saving your streams as they happen using our instructions earlier.
You never know when you’ll want to look back at earlier moments in your streaming career. Additionally, streaming live is only one part of the content creator ecosystem. Just like how movies live a long live on DVD and BluRay after showing in theatres, your video content to can live on for people to enjoy long after you hit Stop Streaming.