Search hours of past streams for the moments worth clipping

The four-hour haystack

Streams are long and mostly unscripted, which is what makes the good moments good and also what makes them hard to find. You remember the bit where you rage-quit the boss, or the story about your first job, but not which stream or which hour.

Platform VODs may also expire after a while, depending on the platform and your account, so anything you did not download or record locally can be gone when you finally want it.

How streamers find clips today

Keeping a local recording of each stream and searching it yourself is the option that keeps working when VODs expire.

Local recordings are large, so many streamers keep them on an external drive. MediaFind indexes folders where they are; if you later move them, relink the library to the new folder instead of reindexing.

• Viewer clips. Free and crowd-sourced, but they catch what chat noticed, cut wherever the viewer stopped.
• An editor who watches everything. Great results, and the cost grows with every hour you stream.
• Cloud clipping services. Quick automatic suggestions from your VODs. The picks favor what the service scores highly, and your footage is processed on its servers.

Searching your stream archive

Record locally (many streaming apps can save a copy while you broadcast) and point MediaFind at that folder. It reads MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV and WebM, and while the app is open it checks the folder about once a minute and indexes a new recording once it has finished writing. Then search:

• What you said: “the story about working at the pizza place.” Search is by meaning, so you don't need the exact words.
• What was on screen: “boss fight in a lava cave” or “victory screen.”
• On-screen text: a game's kill feed, a level name, or an alert overlay, when the text is legible in the frame.
• Guests: speaker labels separate you from a co-streamer or guest, and naming a voice once carries the name into other streams.
• Sound: music search and sound events help find loud or musical stretches in a long recording.

Clip it, crop it, caption it

With Pro, Auto-Reel ranks the best moments of a long recording as short highlights, a quick way to get a shortlist from a stream you didn't watch back. Highlight reels can stitch every moment about one topic or tag into a single video, such as a monthly best-of.

1. Cut the found moment out as a clip of its own.
2. Open it in Create, the free built-in editor, and reframe for vertical so the gameplay and facecam fit a phone screen. See making vertical video from horizontal.
3. Trim by editing the transcript to drop dead air and filler words, and burn in captions.
4. Render an MP4 for TikTok, Shorts or Reels.

Game audio, music and chat

Music playing on stream is a common reason clips get muted or taken down, and game publishers have their own policies on footage. Check both before posting, and use music search to spot clips with music under them. Guests and co-streamers should know you are clipping them for other platforms.

If a stream exists only as a VOD, the Pro media downloader can pull public media from a link so it becomes searchable, but only use it on your own streams or content you have the rights to. Everything else runs on your computer with no account.

Frequently asked questions

Can MediaFind search MKV recordings?

Yes. It reads MKV along with MP4, MOV, M4V and WebM. Other formats need converting to one of these first.

Can I make vertical clips with facecam and gameplay?

The free Create editor can reframe a clip for vertical, trim it, burn in captions and render an MP4. Arrange the framing to fit your layout.

Can it index a stream while I'm still live?

Folder watching indexes a recording once the file has finished being written, so a stream is picked up after it ends, while MediaFind is open.

Do my streams get uploaded for analysis?

No. Transcription, indexing and search run on your computer. The media downloader, a Pro feature, only fetches a public link you paste in.