RechatTool

When you watch a VOD on Twitch, a replay of the live chat is also provided, enabling you to view exactly what has been said by the viewers at specific times during the stream. There are plenty of applications that can help you download the videos, but saving chat messages is a bit more difficult.

RechatTool is a small, open-source program designed to capture entire chat replays and save them locally. It is not the most novice-friendly utility out there, since it lacks a GUI, but it is not too difficult to use, and it can export chat replays to TXT files.

It is important to note that this program does not come with a graphical user interface, so you have no choice but to launch it using the command console. If no parameters are specified, a short list of instructions will be displayed.

When you want to download a Twitch chat replay, simply grab the VOD’s ID from the URL and paste it after the -d, -p or -D command. If you don’t provide a path, the file will be saved in the current folder.

Unless otherwise specified, the program saves chat replays as JSON files. These can then be processed and converted to TXT, a job that can also be performed as soon as the initial data has been downloaded.

It is worth noting that it could take quite a bit of time to save chat replays from very popular channels, as tens of thousands of messages could be available from a single stream.

In the end, RechatTool is a relatively basic utility, but it can do the job very well, as long as having to use the command console is not an issue. It would certainly help if a GUI were added in future releases, but the program is not that difficult to use.