A few months ago was the Twitch Clipocalypse as some people I know have taken to calling it.
In a frenzy, suddenly many streamers found themselves under extreme pressure to delete all their clips or face legal consequences. As a last minute save, some community members were able to download and archive every clip. In this post I will show you an easy way to do the same.

This guide focuses on Windows 7/10, but the final command we create will work for youtube-dl on any operating system, so you should be able to figure it out. So, without further ado:

Saving a Twitch streamer’s full clip library

1. Setting up youtube-dl

Youtube-dl is a program that was made to make it easy to quickly and automatically download videos, and as the name implies, it was especially made for YouTube. We will be using it for Twitch.
Their official main page is at: https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/
You may also find youtube-dl.org and yt-dl.org, which are mirrors of the project.

Choosing where to save the clips

This process will create a lot of files and (most probably) use a decent amount of space on your computer. For a test of 500 clips, it used about 6GB for me. Therefore, you need to first create a folder to contain all the clips and the program we are about to download.

Downloading youtube-dl

If you are on Windows, you can use this mirror direct download link to get the latest version of youtube-dl.exe. Note that this requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) if you don’t have it already.
Don’t run youtube-dl directly! Save it to the folder you chose in the last step. In the next step we will create the command we must use to run it.

2. Choosing what clips to download

This command will download every clip with more than 50 views, but no more than 1000 clips. They will be organized so that the most viewed clips are sorted first.

The command you start with is:

youtube-dl.exe --max-downloads 1000 --min-views 50 -o "%(autonumber)s [%(view_count)sv] %(title)s (%(upload_date)s).%(ext)s" https://www.twitch.tv/<STREAMER>/clips?range=all

What you need to change:
<STREAMER> to their username. Such as evanito

I also recommend you change:

  • The max-downloads number to the maximum number of clips you want to download.
    Leave it alone to download up to 1000 clips.
  • The min-views number to the minimum views on a clip for you to download it.
    Leave it alone to only download clips with more than 50 views.

Copy your final command to your clipboard!

3. Running youtube-dl

Now that you have your command on your clipboard, it’s time to start the download.

Opening command prompt

To run our command, we need to use command prompt in the folder we are working in.
To open command prompt in our current folder, we can simply type cmd into the folder path bar at the top of Windows Explorer and hit enter.

Windows Explorer cmd Example
Windows Explorer cmd Example

After hitting enter, a command prompt should open.
Next we simply right click into the command prompt window (hopefully the command is still on your clipboard!) to paste the command, then hit enter to start downloading!

Download was a success!
Download was a success!

It may take a while to complete, but you should see the folder start filling up with clips.

Troubleshooting

  • When I run the command, command prompt says “The system cannot find the file specified.”
    • This can happen for multiple reasons, please check that:
      • You opened command prompt in the same folder that you put youtube-dl.exe in.
      • You remembered to replace <STREAMER> with the name of a streamer in the command before running.
  • I use Git Bash or some other Windows shell besides command prompt, and it says “bash: youtube-dl.exe: command not found”
    • Bash requires executables to start with ./ in order to run them, so add that to the beginning of your command so that it looks like ./youtube-dl.exe --max...