How to Transcribe a Full Livestream VOD (Up to 10 Hours)

Clip transcription is a solved problem. Whole-broadcast transcription is the one that keeps breaking.

A streamer goes live for seven hours. The VOD disappears from Twitch after a set window, or gets buried on Kick. Somewhere in there is the segment you actually want — the sponsor read, the announcement, the take that got clipped out of context. Scrubbing a timeline to find it is miserable, and most transcription tools quietly refuse the job: they cap out at two or four hours, or they accept the file and hand back a transcript that stops a third of the way through.

SubGrab now handles livestream VODs up to 10 hours in a single pass. This post explains what changed, what it costs, and where the real limits still are.

Why Long VODs Break Most Tools

A livestream VOD is not a video file in the normal sense. It's a recording of a broadcast, stored as thousands of small HLS fragments, and — critically — most streaming platforms don't publish an audio-only version of it. A podcast gives you a 60 MB MP3. A seven-hour Kick VOD gives you a video rendition and nothing else, so anything that wants the audio has to pull video down to get at it.

That's why length caps exist. At full quality, a seven-hour broadcast is tens of gigabytes. Downloading that to extract speech is absurd, so tools either refuse long VODs outright or time out halfway and call it a failure.

The way through is to stop treating quality as the goal. Transcription only needs the audio track, and on these platforms every video rendition carries the same audio. So the correct move is to take the smallest rendition that still has sound — 160p, which nobody will ever watch — and throw the pixels away. The speech is bit-for-bit identical to what's in the 1080p60 version, at a fraction of the size.

What It Costs

Pricing is per hour of content, and it doesn't change for long videos:

Two things worth knowing before you paste a link:

• You see the cost before you're charged. A long VOD is quoted up front — the exact credit count appears next to a confirm button, and nothing is deducted until you click it. There is no way to accidentally spend 8 credits.
• Failures are refunded automatically. If the download or transcription fails for any reason, the credits go straight back to your balance. You can see every movement in your dashboard.

Because a new account starts with 2 free credits, a full 8-hour broadcast is not something you can transcribe for free — that's an honest limitation rather than a hidden one. Use the free credits on a clip or a shorter video first to see whether the output is what you need.

Platform by Platform

• Kick — Kick VODs are whole unedited broadcasts, routinely 6 to 8 hours. All supported up to 10 hours. Kick publishes no captions at all, so every transcript is AI-generated from the audio.
• Twitch — Clips and VODs both work. Twitch deletes past broadcasts after a limited window — at most 60 days, and shorter for most channels — so transcribing is also an archiving move: the text outlives the video. See saving Twitch VOD transcripts before they expire.
• CHZZK and SOOP — Korea's two big streaming platforms, same 10-hour ceiling, with strong Korean-language accuracy. See the East Asia platform guide.

Do Timestamps Stay Accurate at Hour Nine?

This is the question that matters for long content, and it's where a lot of tools quietly fall apart. Timestamps drift when a transcript is assembled from chunks that each restart their clock at zero.

SubGrab splits long audio into 45-minute pieces, transcribes them, and then offsets each piece by its real position before merging. A line at 8:42:15 is genuinely at 8:42:15. That's what makes the transcript useful as an index — you search for "sponsor", get a timestamp, and jump straight there in the original VOD.

Use the Summary for Long VODs

For anything over about two hours, read the AI summary before the transcript. A ten-hour broadcast produces an enormous wall of text; the summary gives you a chapter breakdown with timestamps, so you can find the twenty minutes you care about and read only those.

One honest note on very long recordings: if a transcript ever exceeds what the summarising model can read in a single pass, the summary says so explicitly rather than pretending it covered the whole thing. At the context sizes current models offer, that no longer happens within the lengths we accept — and the transcript itself is always complete either way.

What Still Won't Work

• Uploaded files cap out around 50 minutes, not 10 hours. Your browser extracts the audio before sending it, and that extracted audio hits a 100 MB upload limit long before the duration limit matters. For long content, paste the URL instead of uploading.
• Active live streams — the broadcast has to have ended and the VOD published.
• Broadcasts over 10 hours. They're turned away before any charge, and the quote says so. CHZZK and SOOP replays of 12 hours or more are common; those can't be transcribed from the link.
• Deleted or expired VODs. Twitch in particular deletes on a timer. Transcribe while it exists.

Try It

Paste a VOD link and you'll see the length, the credit cost, and a confirm button before anything is charged.

Transcribe a livestream VOD →