Live Recording

Last updated 6 September 2026

Set up auto-record monitors, hardware-accelerated compression, and live preview thumbnails.

How It Works

StreamStash continuously monitors the TikTok, Twitch and Kick channels you've added and automatically starts recording when they go live. The entire process is hands-off — set it up once and let it run.

• The monitor cycle runs every 3 minutes
• Up to 12 users are checked per cycle in parallel
• Detection is lightweight — no browser window or resource-heavy polling
• Recordings start within seconds of a live being detected

Adding a Monitor

A monitor is what turns on live recording. Add one for a TikTok creator, a Twitch channel, or a Kick channel, and StreamStash watches it and starts recording automatically when it goes live.

1. TikTok: Enter a TikTok username in the Add User form, check the Monitor option, and click Lookup.
2. Twitch or Kick: Open Add User, choose Twitch or Kick, and paste the channel URL. Adding the channel as a monitor is what enables live recording, rather than only checking it for saved VODs.
3. The channel appears in the monitors list with a Live or Idle status badge, and its recordings land on the Streaming Lives page.

Monitors share one allowance across every platform, so a TikTok, Twitch, and Kick channel each use one monitor slot.

Platform Differences

The recording mechanics are shared, but each platform has a few specifics worth knowing:

• TikTok records a creator's Live, and on the Power tier can capture the chat and gift timeline. Live recording is on the free tier, with two live monitors on Free.
• Twitch records the broadcast and marks and skips ad breaks automatically during playback, since Twitch plays ads into the stream itself. A VOD you download brings its chat replay with it, free on every tier. Capturing chat live during the recording is a Power feature, covering streams that never become a VOD or whose VOD expires first. Twitch live recording itself is on the free tier.
• Kick records the clean broadcast with no ads to skip, because Kick does not play ads into live streams. Kick chat can be read back for a short while after a stream ends, so its chat replay is fetched once the recording finishes rather than during it (Power tier). Kick live recording is on the Personal tier.

For Twitch and Kick, where you also have the channel's own VOD of a broadcast, StreamStash tells you which copy is fuller on every tier. Both are kept by default, since the two genuinely differ and a skip cannot be undone. Power users can switch on skipping the duplicate VOD, which is part of deduplication.

Where a creator streams to Twitch and Kick at once, grouping their two accounts shows both audiences against the same recording, interleaved by timestamp with a coloured dot marking which platform each message came from. This is a Power feature, as is the live chat capture it depends on.

Auto Live Clipping

StreamStash can cut highlight clips from a finished recording on TikTok, Twitch and Kick. It is a Power feature, and it is chosen per creator rather than switched on for everyone at once.

• When you add someone to record or monitor, an Auto Live Clipping option appears. It is off unless you tick it, so busy channels you clip and quiet ones you do not.
• Every monitor on the Monitors page shows whether clipping is on for that creator, and one click flips it. The decision is applied when a recording finishes, so turning it on during a stream still clips the recording in progress.
• The seconds-before and seconds-after values that shape each clip live in Settings under Live Recordings and apply to every clip.
• To clip one recording after the fact, turn clipping on for that creator, open the recording in the player and press Re-cut.

The Monitor Dashboard

The Monitors page shows all your tracked creators with:

• Live/Idle status — real-time indicator
• Last seen — when they were last detected live
• Weekly stats — number of recordings this week
• Preview thumbnails — live snapshots captured every 10 seconds during recording

Recording Process

When a live stream is detected, StreamStash:

1. Creates a recording entry in the database
2. Resolves the best available stream URL automatically
3. Starts FFmpeg to record the stream to a .ts file
4. Captures preview thumbnails every 10 seconds
5. Monitors for stream corruption (frozen frames, solid colours)
6. Compresses the recording when complete (if enabled)

Stream Quality Priority

StreamStash always attempts the highest quality first:

FULL_HD (1080p) → HD (720p) → SD1 (480p) → SD2 (360p) → worst available

Compression

Live recordings can be automatically compressed after completion. Configure this in Settings.

Quality Settings

The CRF/CQ slider (range 16–35) controls the quality-size tradeoff:

• 16–20 — near-lossless, large files
• 20–24 — recommended for most users
• 24–30 — smaller files, some quality loss
• 30+ — aggressive compression, visible quality loss

Watching Battles

When a TikTok creator goes into a 1v1, the recording holds both of them side by side in a band across the middle of the screen, with thick black bars above and below. StreamStash finds those stretches automatically and the player sidebar gives you two ways to watch them:

• Focus crops to the creator you were recording, so their half fills the player instead of taking up a quarter of it.
• Trim black bars keeps both creators on screen and drops the empty space around them, so the battle fills the width of the player.

Use either on its own, or leave both off to watch the recording exactly as it was captured. Both are view options only: nothing is changed on disk and the recording is never re-encoded. The sidebar also shows how many battles a recording contains and how long they run altogether, with a chip for each one that seeks straight to it.

New recordings are checked as they finish, so a battle is usually ready by the time you open one. Anything already in your library gets a Find battles button instead, and a scan takes a small fraction of the recording's length. If you have cropped a recording by hand, that crop is left exactly as you set it and Battle view steps aside.

Edit and Export

Right-click anything in your library and choose Edit & export. One window holds Crop and Trim tabs, rotation, and a live preview showing the combined result of every edit. On a TikTok live recording with a completed battle scan, a Battle focus tick box joins them.

There are two ways out of that window:

• Save in Player keeps the result in your library.
• Export a copy opens a normal Save dialog and writes a new file wherever you choose. That copy is your file in your folder and is not added to StreamStash, so your library is unchanged.

Crop and rotation behave as view options either way: they change how something plays inside StreamStash without altering the file. Trim does not, because it writes a file, so the Trim tab asks what should happen to the original. One trim therefore has three possible outcomes:

• Replace this item rewrites the file in the library and permanently removes the footage outside the range. It asks you to confirm first.
• Keep the original, save a new item adds the trimmed clip to your library as a second item, carrying a Trimmed badge that links back to the original. Nothing is destroyed, so there is nothing to confirm.
• Export a copy writes the trimmed version outside StreamStash and leaves the original alone.

• Every edit is applied together in one pass, so an exported video is compressed once rather than once per edit.
• A long recording exports in the background, showing progress and roughly how long is left. Leaving the page or refreshing does not lose it. You can carry on browsing or even play the same video while the copy is made, and you are told when it finishes, including if StreamStash is in the tray. Photos export instantly.
• Ticking Battle focus before you export gives you the whole recording at its usual size, filling the screen with the creator you recorded whenever a battle is on and playing normally the rest of the time.
• Timed crop points cannot be exported: a crop that moves during playback has no single framing to bake in. They keep working as a view option, and an export applies the rotation and trim only, with the button saying so.

Crop, Trim and Rotate are no longer separate right-click items. Everything they did happens in this window.

Corruption Detection

StreamStash automatically detects corrupted recordings by analysing preview frames for:

• Frozen/duplicate frames
• Solid black, grey, purple, or green frames
• Vertical striping artifacts

If corruption is detected (6+ bad frames in a rolling window of 10), the recording is flagged.

Rate Limit Protection

The monitor system includes built-in protections:

• 5-minute cooldown after a failed check to avoid hammering the API
• 90-second minimum between rechecks of the same user
• 2-second stagger (with jitter) between parallel checks
• Automatic backoff on HTTP 403/429 responses, up to 5 minutes
• Username validation — after 3 consecutive offline results, the account is re-verified and an alert is sent if it appears deleted

Discord Notifications

Set up a Recordings webhook in Settings to get Discord notifications when:

• A live stream is detected
• A recording starts
• A recording completes (with duration and file size)
• A recording fails