Twitch Download 2026: VODs & Chat in 12 Steps, 30 Min

There is a specific flavor of regret reserved for the viewer who watched something extraordinary happen live on Twitch, told themselves they would grab it later, and returned sixteen days afterward to a 404. Twitch does not archive your memories. It keeps a regular broadcaster's past streams for fourteen days, extends that window to sixty days for Partners and Affiliates, and then deletes them without ceremony. The platform is enormous and getting bigger — TwitchTracker logged an average of 2,124,774 concurrent viewers across 98,231 live channels in January 2026 — and almost none of that firehose survives by default.

This is a tutorial about taking preservation into your own hands. Not with a browser extension that will be broken by the time you finish reading, but with the three command-line tools that have outlived every fad: yt-dlp for VODs and clips, TwitchDownloader for chat, and Streamlink for live capture. All three are free, open-source, and maintained by people who do not care whether Twitch reshuffled its front-end CSS this week.

A word before the wrench-turning, because The Machine reads the fine print so you do not have to. Twitch's own download feature is restricted to your own footage. Everything a third-party tool grabs beyond that lives in a legal gray zone governed by Twitch's Terms of Service and ordinary copyright law. Archiving a stream for personal reference is one thing; re-uploading a creator's VOD to your monetized channel is another, and courts do not find the distinction subtle. Download like a librarian, not a bootlegger.

Why Twitch Downloads Are a Race Against the Clock

The fourteen-day fuse

The single most important number in this entire guide is 14. That is how many days a regular, non-Affiliate broadcaster's past broadcast — the VOD that Twitch auto-generates from a live stream — remains on the servers before it is purged. Earn Affiliate or Partner status (or hold Twitch Turbo or a Prime connection on the channel) and the window stretches to 60 days. That is the entire generosity of the platform: two weeks for the newcomer, two months for the credentialed. The clock starts the instant the stream ends, not the instant you remember the stream existed.

This matters because the content people most want to preserve — the nine-hour subathon, the world-first speedrun, the meltdown that becomes a meme — is exactly the content that lives on the expiring VOD timer. If you are the sort of person who bookmarks things to watch on the weekend, you are the sort of person who will lose them. The only defense is to download the day the thing airs.

The scale of what is quietly disappearing

Context makes the loss legible. StreamRecorder's 2026 figures put Twitch at 35 million-plus daily active viewers and 7.5 million-plus monthly streamers. Icon Era's 2026 statistics estimate 240 million monthly active users globally for both 2025 and 2026, with 37.2 million of them in the United States. Backlinko clocked 25.76 million app downloads across Google Play and the Apple App Store in just the first two quarters of 2025. Business of Apps pegs the platform's 2024 revenue at an estimated $1.8 billion, which is the sort of money that keeps creator tooling funded but does nothing to keep your favorite VOD alive past day fourteen.

Compare TwitchTracker's monthly averages and you see a platform that barely wobbles: January 2026's 2,124,774 concurrent viewers across 98,231 channels; June 2026's 1,997,256 concurrent viewers across 87,649 channels. That is millions of hours of live content per day, an overwhelming majority of which is never archived by anyone. The broader migration of play toward the PC ecosystem — a shift we cover in our look at PC overtaking console on revenue by 2028 — only pushes more of gaming's cultural record onto ephemeral livestream platforms. Downloading is not hoarding. It is the only archive that exists.

What Twitch will and will not hand you

Twitch does provide a download button. It is buried in the Video Producer, and per the third-party guidance circulating in 2026 — including AppsGolem's walkthrough — it is strictly broadcaster only. You can download your own past broadcasts. You cannot download anyone else's through the official interface. For everyone else's content, and for the moment your own VOD ages out, third-party tooling is the entire game. The rest of this tutorial is that game.

Clips vs VODs vs Highlights: Know What You're Grabbing

Before you type a single command, understand that "downloading Twitch" is three or four different tasks wearing one coat. Each content type behaves differently on the servers, expires on a different schedule, and rewards a different tool.

VODs: the past broadcast on a timer

A VOD (Video On Demand) is the automatic recording of a live stream. It carries the full runtime — a subathon VOD can be nine, twelve, twenty hours — and it is the content on the 14-day (or 60-day) deletion fuse. Technically it is served as HLS: a master playlist pointing at thousands of short .ts or fMP4 segments, with a top "chunked" rendition that is the untranscoded source and a ladder of lower-quality re-encodes beneath it. VODs are the reason yt-dlp exists in this workflow, and the reason speed and authentication matter.

Clips: 5 to 60 seconds, effectively immortal

A clip is a short segment — typically 5 to 60 seconds — that any viewer can carve out of a live stream or VOD. Crucially, clips do not expire. They can sit on Twitch's servers indefinitely, which is why nearly every 2026 download guide treats clips as the easiest content type to archive: there is no clock, and per AppsGolem a downloaded clip can preserve the original broadcast bitrate with no re-encoding, so you lose nothing to a transcode. If the moment you care about is short, someone has probably already clipped it, and that clip is the cleanest thing you can save.

Highlights and uploads: curated and persistent

Highlights are segments a broadcaster manually carves out of a VOD and chooses to keep. Per 2026 guidance they behave like clips in one important respect: unlike the raw VOD they were cut from, highlights do not expire. Broadcasters use them to survive the 14-day purge — promote a VOD moment to a highlight and it persists after the parent VOD is gone. Uploads (videos a creator uploads directly rather than streaming) also persist. The practical takeaway: if a moment survived on a channel past its expected expiry, it was probably promoted to a highlight, and yt-dlp treats a highlight URL the same as a VOD URL. Know which of the four you are pointing at, and half the confusion evaporates.

Prerequisites: Software Versions and Hardware

The software stack

Four tools cover every Twitch download scenario. Install all of them now; you will use at least three before the day is out.

yt-dlp is the backbone for VODs and clips. It uses date-based releases (a build labeled something like 2026.xx.xx), and the single most important habit in this entire discipline is keeping it current — Twitch changes its GraphQL API often enough that a binary more than a few weeks old will start throwing 403s on formats that worked yesterday. It needs Python 3.8 or newer if you install via pip, or you can drop the self-contained binary from the GitHub releases page and skip Python entirely. FFmpeg (the 6.x or 7.x line) is a hard dependency for merging segments, remuxing, and every chat-render operation. TwitchDownloaderCLI (grab the latest release from the repo) is the only tool here that downloads and renders chat. Streamlink (6.x or newer) records live streams as they air. Install the lot:

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg streamlink

# Windows (winget)
winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp
winget install Gyan.FFmpeg
winget install Streamlink.Streamlink

# Linux / any OS with Python 3.8+
python3 -m pip install -U yt-dlp streamlink

# TwitchDownloaderCLI: download the binary from the GitHub Releases page
# https://github.com/lay295/TwitchDownloader/releases

Hardware and storage math

Downloading is network-bound, not compute-bound; any machine from the last decade will saturate a home connection. The real constraint is disk. A 1080p60 Twitch source runs roughly 6 Mbps of video plus about 160 kbps of audio — call it ~2.7 GB per hour. A three-hour VOD is around 8 GB; a nine-hour subathon finale is comfortably 16–25 GB. An SSD is not required for the download but makes the subsequent FFmpeg remux and chat render far less painful. Rendering chat to a burned-in video overlay is compute-bound and will pin every core you own — if your machine sounds like a jet on takeoff during a chat render, that is expected, and much the same thermal reality we describe in our GPU overclocking walkthrough. Budget the storage, use an SSD if you have one, and do not render chat on a laptop balanced on a duvet.

Accounts, cookies, and permissions

Public VODs and clips need no login. But subscriber-only VODs, some mature-flagged content, and a broadcaster's own private uploads require an authenticated session. The clean way to pass that authentication to yt-dlp is not to paste tokens into a terminal — it is to point yt-dlp at your logged-in browser's cookie jar with --cookies-from-browser. Have Firefox or a Chromium browser logged into the correct Twitch account before you start, and keep it closed during the download if the browser locks its cookie database. If you are also capturing your own console's output to feed into a stream, our PS Remote Play setup guide covers the upstream half of that pipeline.

The Official Route: Video Producer (Broadcaster-Only)

Where the button actually lives

If the VOD you want is your own, start here — it is the only method Twitch officially blesses, and it is the least likely to break. Per AppsGolem's 2026 instructions, the path is: go to dashboard.twitch.tv, open Content → Video Producer, find the past broadcast in the list, open the three-dot menu on that row, and select Download. Twitch packages the source and hands you an MP4. There is no quality selector and no re-encode negotiation; you get what you streamed.

Why it is broadcaster-only, and what that means for you

The download control simply does not appear for content you did not broadcast. This is deliberate: the official pipeline exists so creators can retrieve their own work, not so viewers can mirror the platform. Multiple 2026 third-party guides describe the button in exactly these terms — broadcaster-only, no exceptions through the UI. The practical consequence is stark: the instant you want someone else's VOD, or your own VOD after it has already been auto-deleted, the official route is a dead end and you drop down to yt-dlp. Do not waste ten minutes hunting for a download button that the interface will never render for you.

Exporting before you lose it

Two adjacent Video Producer features are worth knowing. First, Twitch can export a VOD or highlight directly to YouTube, which is a serviceable off-platform backup even if the quality path is Twitch's choice rather than yours. Second, promoting a VOD moment to a highlight before day fourteen preserves it past the purge, buying you time to download it properly later. Neither replaces a local download, but both are free insurance for the specific case where the content is yours and the clock is ticking. For a lighter-weight companion procedure aimed squarely at your own broadcasts, see our 15-minute VOD download setup.

Downloading VODs With yt-dlp: 12 Steps

This is the core of the whole discipline. yt-dlp turns a Twitch VOD URL into a local file with a single command, but the difference between a clean source-quality archive and a corrupt, desynced, half-downloaded mess is entirely in the flags. Work the twelve steps in order; each one exists to prevent a specific failure.

Before you start: update and probe (steps 1–4)

The first four steps are reconnaissance. You do not commit bandwidth to a VOD until you know it is reachable and you know which format is the true source. Run yt-dlp with -F to list formats first — the output tells you everything:

[twitch:vod] 2145678901: Downloading stream metadata JSON
[info] Available formats for 2145678901:
ID          RESOLUTION   FPS |   TBR  | NOTE
audio_only  audio only       |  160k  |
160p        284x160      30  |  228k  |
360p        640x360      30  |  628k  |
480p        852x480      30  | 1428k  |
720p60      1280x720     60  | 3427k  |
1080p60     1920x1080    60  | 6180k  |
chunked     1920x1080    60  | 6180k  | source

The chunked rendition is the one you want: it is the untranscoded source. The numbered ladders below it (720p60, 480p, and so on) are lossy re-encodes with lower bitrates. If you download "1080p60" instead of "chunked" you may still get source, but naming chunked explicitly guarantees it.

The download command (steps 5–9)

With the format confirmed, assemble the real command. This one selects the source, parallelizes fragment fetching, authenticates from your browser, and writes to a predictable, collision-free filename:

yt-dlp \
  -f "chunked/best" \
  -N 8 \
  --cookies-from-browser firefox \
  -o "%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s" \
  https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2145678901

Run it and you will see HLS fragment progress. Expected output looks like this — watch the first few percent for 403 errors, which mean an auth or format problem, not a slow connection:

[twitch:vod] Extracting URL: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2145678901
[info] chunked: Downloading 1 format(s): chunked
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 4212
[download] Destination: PhantomlordLives/20260603 - Subathon Finale .mp4
[download]  38.7% of ~15.94GiB at 11.20MiB/s ETA 14:52 (frag 1631/4212)

Verify and pair with chat (steps 10–12)

A download that reports "100%" is not a download that is intact. Play the file, confirm the runtime matches the stream length, and only then consider the VOD saved. Then — and this is the step everyone forgets — download the chat separately, because yt-dlp does not touch it and chat dies with the VOD. The full twelve-step procedure:

1. Copy the canonical VOD URL from twitch.tv/videos/ID. Rationale: the numeric ID is the stable handle even if the broadcaster later renames the stream.
2. Update yt-dlp with yt-dlp -U (or reinstall the binary). Rationale: Twitch's API drifts constantly; a stale build is the number-one cause of sudden 403s.
3. Probe formats with yt-dlp -F URL. Rationale: confirms you can actually access the VOD and reveals which rendition is source before you spend bandwidth.
4. Select the source format with -f "chunked/best". Rationale: chunked is untranscoded; the numbered ladders are lower-bitrate re-encodes.
5. Set an output template with -o. Rationale: predictable, sortable, collision-free filenames turn a folder of MP4s into an archive, and embedding the ID lets you match chat later.
6. Authenticate with --cookies-from-browser firefox. Rationale: subscriber-only and mature VODs return 403 without a logged-in session, and cookies pass that session without exposing tokens.
7. Parallelize with -N 8. Rationale: an HLS VOD is thousands of tiny fragments; eight concurrent fetches saturate your line instead of trickling one segment at a time.
8. Choose the container (default MP4, or --remux-video mkv). Rationale: MKV tolerates odd codec combinations that MP4 rejects; MP4 is friendlier to editors.
9. Run the download and watch the opening percent. Rationale: auth and format failures surface immediately as 403s, not at the end — catch them before you have wasted an hour.
10. Verify integrity by playing the file and checking duration. Rationale: a truncated download can still report success; only the runtime tells the truth.
11. Download the chat with TwitchDownloaderCLI (next section). Rationale: yt-dlp ignores chat entirely, and chat is deleted alongside the VOD — grab it in the same session.
12. Store with a manifest — keep the URL, ID, date, and a checksum. Rationale: an archive without metadata is a pile of files; a manifest makes it searchable and your downloads reproducible.

Downloading Clips the Fast Way

The one-line clip grab

Clips are the gentlest target on Twitch: short, permanent, and cleanly served. yt-dlp handles both clip URL shapes — the standalone clips.twitch.tv/SLUG form and the channel-embedded twitch.tv/CHANNEL/clip/SLUG form — with no special flags:

# Either URL form works
yt-dlp "https://clips.twitch.tv/EnergeticColdbloodedWalrusKappa"

yt-dlp "https://www.twitch.tv/phantomlordlives/clip/EnergeticColdbloodedWalrusKappa"

Because clips never expire, there is no urgency and no auth juggling for public clips. The whole task is one line and a couple of seconds. This is why every serious archivist treats clips as the low-hanging fruit and VODs as the real work.

Preserving source quality

The quality question deserves a flag. Per AppsGolem's 2026 guidance, downloading a clip can preserve the original broadcast bitrate with no re-encoding — but only if you take the source rendition and do not let any post-processing step transcode it. List the clip's formats with -F, take the top one, and avoid any --recode-video flag:

yt-dlp -F "https://clips.twitch.tv/EnergeticColdbloodedWalrusKappa"
# then pick the highest ID explicitly, e.g. 1080
yt-dlp -f 1080 "https://clips.twitch.tv/EnergeticColdbloodedWalrusKappa"

The dev-tools fallback

When a downloader chokes on a clip — an embed on an external site, an unusual URL shape — the manual method always works, and it is exactly how many unofficial downloaders operate under the hood. Per AppsGolem, the workflow is to extract the direct media URL from the page or the browser's developer tools. Open DevTools, switch to the Network tab, filter for .mp4 or .m3u8, reload the clip, and the direct asset URL appears in the request list. Feed that straight to FFmpeg:

# Copy the direct .mp4 URL from DevTools -> Network, then:
ffmpeg -i "https://production.assets.clips.twitchcdn.net/....mp4" -c copy clip.mp4

The -c copy means a stream copy with no re-encode — you get the bytes Twitch served, nothing added, nothing lost.

Archiving Chat With TwitchDownloader

Why chat is the first thing to vanish

Chat is the half of Twitch that the video tools ignore, and it is the half that carries the context. A VOD of a clutch play is a clip; a VOD of a clutch play with the chat losing its mind in real time is the historical record. yt-dlp does not download chat. Streamlink does not download chat. Only TwitchDownloader does, and because chat is stored against the VOD, it is deleted the moment the VOD ages out. If you save the video and skip the chat, you have preserved a silent film. Our companion piece on downloading VODs and chat together treats this as non-negotiable, and so should you.

Downloading the raw chat JSON

TwitchDownloaderCLI's chatdownload mode pulls every message, timestamp, badge, and emote reference into a JSON file. Point it at the same numeric VOD ID you used for yt-dlp:

TwitchDownloaderCLI chatdownload --id 2145678901 -o chat_2145678901.json

That JSON is the durable artifact — plain, greppable, future-proof. Keep it even if you never render it, because from the JSON you can regenerate any visual format later, but from a rendered video you can never recover the structured data.

Rendering chat to a video overlay

The feature that makes TwitchDownloader indispensable is chatrender: it turns that JSON into an actual video of the chat scrolling in real time, which you can composite alongside the VOD. It leans on FFmpeg and will use every CPU core you have:

# Render a 340px-wide, 1080-tall chat column at 60fps
TwitchDownloaderCLI chatrender -i chat_2145678901.json -o chat_2145678901.mp4 \
  -h 1080 -w 340 --framerate 60 --font-size 18

# Composite the chat column to the right of the VOD (no re-encode of the VOD stream where possible)
ffmpeg -i "Subathon Finale.mp4" -i chat_2145678901.mp4 \
  -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v]hstack=inputs=2" -c:a copy vod_with_chat.mp4

If chatrender complains that FFmpeg is missing, pass --ffmpeg-path pointing at your binary, or install FFmpeg so it is on PATH. The render is the slow part of the entire workflow — a multi-hour chat log can take real wall-clock time to draw — so kick it off and walk away.

Recording Live Streams With Streamlink

Recording as it airs

Sometimes there is no VOD to wait for — the broadcaster has VODs disabled, or you simply do not trust the 14-day clock. Streamlink records the live stream to disk in real time. It writes an MPEG-TS file, which is the correct container for a stream that might be interrupted, because a .ts file remains playable even if the recording is cut off mid-write:

streamlink --twitch-low-latency \
  https://www.twitch.tv/phantomlordlives best \
  -o "phantomlord_{time:%Y%m%d_%H%M%S}.ts"

The best keyword selects the highest available quality; --twitch-low-latency keeps you close to the live edge, which matters if you are also watching. The filename template stamps the capture with a start time so back-to-back recordings never collide.

Dealing with ads and latency

Twitch's server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is the perennial annoyance of live capture — ads are stitched into the same stream as the content, so a naive recorder captures the ads too. Recent Streamlink builds filter Twitch ads by default, so you may need no flag at all; older releases exposed an explicit ad-disable option that newer versions folded into default behavior. If ads still leak into your capture, the fix is almost always the same as everywhere else in this guide: update Streamlink. Low-latency mode and ad filtering both depend on the plugin keeping pace with Twitch's changes.

Remuxing the result into something seekable

An MPEG-TS capture plays fine but seeks poorly and is awkward in editors. Once the stream ends, remux it into a proper MP4 with a fast-start flag — a stream copy, so it is instant and lossless:

ffmpeg -i phantomlord_20260603_201500.ts -c copy -movflags +faststart phantomlord.mp4

No quality is lost; you are repackaging the same bytes into a container built for playback and editing. Keep the .ts until you have verified the MP4, then delete it to reclaim the space.

Five Pitfalls That Break Twitch Downloads

Pitfall 1: waiting, and pitfall 2: grabbing the wrong quality

Waiting too long is the fatal one. The 14-day fuse (60 for Affiliates and Partners) is not a suggestion, and there is no undelete. Download the day the content airs; treat "I'll get it this weekend" as a decision to lose it. Grabbing a transcode instead of the source is the quiet one. If you let yt-dlp default to a numbered rendition like 720p60, you have archived a lossy re-encode forever. Always confirm with -F and name chunked explicitly — source or nothing.

Pitfall 3: forgetting the chat, and pitfall 4: trusting extensions

Forgetting the chat ruins otherwise-complete archives. Chat is stored against the VOD and dies with it, and no video tool captures it — you must run TwitchDownloaderCLI in the same session or the context is gone forever. Trusting a browser extension or random website is the beginner's trap. They break every time Twitch touches its front end, many silently re-encode your download to a lower bitrate, and a fair number are ad-laden or worse. The command-line trio in this guide is maintained by active open-source projects precisely so it survives Twitch's changes; a one-click site is a coin flip.

Pitfall 5: ignoring the law (and the API)

Ignoring the legal line is the one that can actually cost you. Twitch's Terms of Service and copyright law both distinguish between archiving content for personal reference and redistributing someone else's work — re-uploading a creator's VOD to a monetized channel is a copyright problem, full stop. Download like a librarian. And a bonus technical pitfall that behaves like a law of nature: a stale yt-dlp. Twitch's API changes often enough that a binary a month old will start returning 403s on formats that worked before. When something breaks for no visible reason, update first and debug second.

Troubleshooting Table

The table

Most failures fall into a handful of buckets. Match the symptom, apply the fix, and only escalate if the obvious remedy fails.

The 403 problem, explained

Ninety percent of Twitch download failures are a 403, and a 403 means exactly one of three things: the content is gone, the content needs auth you have not supplied, or your tool is too old to speak Twitch's current API. Diagnose in that order. Run -F first — if it lists formats, the content exists and is reachable, so the problem is your download flags, not access. If -F itself 403s, update the tool; if it still 403s after updating, add cookies; if it still 403s with valid cookies, the VOD is subscriber-gated to an account you are not on, or it has been deleted.

When the file plays but is broken

A subtler failure is a file that opens, plays the first minute, then stutters, desyncs, or ends early. This is almost always a concatenation or container issue rather than a bad download. Remux it losslessly into MKV with -c copy — MKV's more forgiving structure fixes a startling number of these — and if the desync persists, re-run the original download adding --hls-use-mpegts so fragments are handled as MPEG-TS during assembly. Only reach for a full re-encode as the last resort, because it costs quality you cannot get back.

Advanced Tips: Automation and Speed

Batch and channel-wide archiving

Point yt-dlp at a file of URLs and it works the whole list unattended — ideal for saving a creator's entire clip catalog or a backlog of VODs before they expire. Combine that with a download archive so re-runs skip what you already have:

# urls.txt holds one VOD or clip URL per line
yt-dlp -a urls.txt --download-archive done.txt -f "chunked/best" -N 8

The --download-archive file records every completed ID; run the same command tomorrow and yt-dlp grabs only the new entries. This is the backbone of any standing archive.

Automating with a scheduler

For a channel you follow closely, a small script on a cron job (or Windows Task Scheduler) can poll for new VODs and pull them within the download window — the difference between catching content on day one and losing it on day fifteen. Keep the job conservative: run it a few times a day, lean on the download archive to avoid duplicates, and log its output so a silent failure does not become a silent gap in your collection. Automation is what turns "I meant to save that" into "I have every stream since March."

Squeezing out more speed

When -N 8 is not enough — a massive subathon VOD on a fat connection — hand the fragment fetching to an external multi-connection downloader. yt-dlp integrates with aria2c cleanly:

yt-dlp --downloader aria2c --downloader-args "aria2c:-x 16 -k 1M" \
  -f "chunked/best" https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2145678901

That opens sixteen connections with 1 MB chunks and will typically saturate any residential line. Do not go overboard — hammering Twitch's CDN with absurd concurrency invites rate-limiting, which is slower than just using eight sane connections. Fast and courteous beats fast and throttled.

The Complete Working Configuration

The yt-dlp config file

Everything above collapses into a config file so you never retype flags. Drop this at ~/.config/yt-dlp/config on Linux or macOS, or %APPDATA%\yt-dlp\config.txt on Windows, and every invocation inherits your defaults:

# ~/.config/yt-dlp/config   (Windows: %APPDATA%\yt-dlp\config.txt)
-f chunked/best
-N 8
--cookies-from-browser firefox
--embed-metadata
--embed-chapters
--download-archive archived-ids.txt
--no-mtime
-o %(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s

The Streamlink config file

Streamlink takes the same treatment at ~/.config/streamlink/config (or %APPDATA%\streamlink\config). Two lines cover the common case:

# ~/.config/streamlink/config
twitch-low-latency
default-stream=best

The full VOD-plus-chat archive script

Finally, the one script that ties the whole tutorial together: hand it a VOD ID and it saves the source video, the raw chat JSON, and a rendered chat overlay in one pass. This is the complete, working archive job.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# archive-vod.sh -- save a Twitch VOD, its chat JSON, and a rendered chat overlay
set -euo pipefail

VOD_ID="$1"
URL="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/${VOD_ID}"

# 1. Video, source quality, authenticated
yt-dlp -f "chunked/best" -N 8 --cookies-from-browser firefox \
  -o "%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s" "$URL"

# 2. Raw chat (the durable, greppable artifact)
TwitchDownloaderCLI chatdownload --id "$VOD_ID" -o "chat_${VOD_ID}.json"

# 3. Rendered chat overlay column
TwitchDownloaderCLI chatrender -i "chat_${VOD_ID}.json" -o "chat_${VOD_ID}.mp4" \
  -h 1080 -w 340 --framerate 60 --font-size 18

echo "Archived VOD ${VOD_ID}: video + chat.json + chat.mp4"

Make it executable with chmod +x archive-vod.sh and run ./archive-vod.sh 2145678901. That is the entire discipline in one file: source video, structured chat, visual chat, named and dated, ready for cold storage. Twitch will delete its copy in fourteen days. Yours does not have a fuse. For the leaner version aimed at your own broadcasts, the 12-step, 15-minute setup covers the same ground in less time — but for anything you cannot afford to lose, run the full script and sleep easy.