Guide · Twitch
How to get a transcriptof a Twitch VOD.
Twitch does not produce transcripts. A past broadcast carries captions only if the streamer sent them live, and it is deleted after 7, 14 or 60 days depending on the channel. Here is how to get the text out before then, from the fastest way to the most manual.
First, check how long you have
Twitch keeps past broadcasts for 7 days on most channels, 14 days for Affiliates, and 60 days for Partners and for streamers with Turbo or Prime. After that the VOD is gone and no tool can transcribe it.
Highlights and uploads stay longer, but since April 2025 they share a 100-hour storage limit per channel, so they are not an archive either. A transcript is: the text outlives the video.
Method 1: paste the VOD link into a transcription tool
The quickest route, and the only one that needs nothing installed. Scribetape fetches the audio from Twitch itself, so there is no download on your side.
What comes back is one document with a timestamp on every line, measured from the start of the VOD. Multi-hour streams are transcribed in sections and stitched back together, so the timestamps run continuously rather than restarting each section; a full-day stream is still one page.
Limits worth knowing before you paste: without signing in you get the first 30 minutes as a preview, the free plan covers the first 72 minutes of a recording, and paid plans go up to 24 hours per recording. Live streams cannot be transcribed until they have ended and been saved as a VOD, and subscriber-only or deleted videos cannot be fetched at all.
- Open the past broadcast on Twitch and copy its address, which looks like twitch.tv/videos/1234567890.
- Paste it into the box on the Twitch transcript page and press Transcribe.
- Wait about five minutes per hour of stream. Most of that is the download: Twitch serves a long VOD in thousands of small fragments. A five-hour VOD took 12 minutes in our measurements and an eight-hour one took 35. The link is permanent, so you can close the tab and come back.
- Read the transcript on the page, use your browser's find to jump to a word, or export it as TXT, SRT or VTT.
Try it on a VOD now.
mp3 · wav · m4a · flac · and more
Method 2: download the VOD, then transcribe the file
Use this when you want a local copy as well, or when the video is only available to you. Your own past broadcasts can be downloaded from the Creator Dashboard, under Content and Video Producer. For other channels' public VODs, a desktop downloader such as TwitchDownloader saves the file.
Before uploading, extract the audio track: an hour of speech as an audio file is a small fraction of the video's size, uploads in seconds, and transcribes exactly the same. The free plan accepts files up to 300 MB; larger allowances come with the paid plans.
- Download the VOD to your computer.
- Extract the audio, for example with ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i vod.mp4 -vn -c:a libopus -b:a 24k vod.opus
- Upload the audio file on the audio-to-text page and wait for the transcript.
Method 3: caption the stream while it is live
For your own future streams there is a third path: send closed captions during the broadcast, through a captioning extension or a captions plugin in your encoder. Twitch then shows a CC button on the live player and keeps the captions on the VOD for viewers.
This is the only way for captions to exist on Twitch itself. It does not give you a text file, though: there is no download button for a VOD's captions, so if you also want the transcript, run the VOD through Method 1 afterwards.
If the VOD has already expired
Once Twitch has deleted a past broadcast, nothing can fetch it, and any service that claims otherwise is guessing. Check whether a highlight or a clip of the moment exists: both are separate videos with their own links and can be transcribed the same way.
For streams you care about, the habit that works is to paste the VOD link the day after the stream. The transcript stays in your library after the VOD is gone.
What to do with the transcript
Searching is the common case: find a quote, a name or a topic in a multi-hour stream and scrub to its timestamp. Editors use the timestamps to find clip-worthy moments without rewatching. For a YouTube re-upload, the SRT or VTT export becomes the caption track. The summary and translation tools work on the same transcript, and every export carries the timestamps with it.