Download videos from Twitch with Twitch Leecher

Twitch Leecher is an open source application for Windows to download videos from the streaming service. The program supports downloading broadcasts, highlights, uploaded videos, and pretty much any content that is available on Twitch.

It can be used to back up Twitch streams, to download streams for offline viewing or record keeping.

The program is compatible with Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and newer versions of Windows, and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8.

You may launch it from the Start menu after installation. A search interface is displayed on start that is used to find streams of interest.

Search is divided into channel, URL and ID searches, with the channel search being divided further into the video types broadcast, highlight and upload, and time limits.

Adding URLs of streams in Twitch Leecher is probably the easiest option to get started. Just switch to the URLs tab in the interface and paste one or multiple Twitch stream URLs into the field that is displayed. Select the search button afterwards and wait for Twitch Leecher to display the results.

Each result is displayed with a large thumbnail, title, views, playtime, and date of stream. All that is left to do is to click on "download" to add the selected item to the download queue. It is downloaded automatically by the application once it has been added to the queue.

The download dialog displays several options; you may change the quality of the video, output folder and filename, and even crop the video in case you are only interested in part of it and not the full stream.

Twitch Leecher downloads streams quickly, especially when you compare its performance to most VOD downloaders out there. The core difference is explained by the author:

Nearly all of the well known VOD downloaders execute the download process via FFMPEG's integrated download capabilities. However, this is extremely slow. The download speed rarely exceeds 1.5Mbit even if the internet connection is 100 times faster. Twitch Leecher does not use FFMPEG for download tasks at all. It downloads thousands of small video chunks in parallel while using all of the available bandwidth of your internet connection. As soon as all video chunks are downloaded, FFMPEG is only used to merge those chunks together in order to create a single video file again.

In short: It does not use FFMPEG to download the VOD files, and that speeds things up significantly.

Visit the settings to change the default folder and filename among other things.

The IDs search option works similarly, but it accepts IDs, which Twitch uses in its URLs, and not URLs.

The most complex search options are available under channel. You need to add the channel name and select the video type. You may furthermore add time limits to the search, e.g. to only display videos published on a specific day or a time period.

The settings list additional options that may be of interest to some users. You may add favorite channels to access them more quickly, add an external video player to the program, or disable the conversion to mp4 there.

Closing Words

Twitch Leecher is a straightforward downloader for Twitch streams that works fast and reliable. It is an excellent option to download streams for offline viewing or backup purposes.

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