Twitch chat replay

Because vod.ing fetches the full chat for every VoD you import, the editor can replay it next to the player. You can scroll, pause, filter, and click timestamps to seek the video.

What it looks like

The chat replay lives in the Live chat tab on the editor's right-side tab group:

The chat replay supports:

• Animated and static 7TV, BTTV, and FFZ emotes alongside Twitch global and channel emotes.
• Most Twitch badges (broadcaster, mod, VIP, subscriber tier, founder, bits, predictions, and more).
• Click any timestamp to seek the player to that exact moment.
• Scroll up to pause autoscroll, scroll back to the bottom to resume. Same behaviour as vanilla Twitch chat.

Filtering the chat log

Switch to the Search chat tab next to Live chat for free-text search across every message in the VoD. The search input accepts:

• A username — follow one chatter across the whole stream.
• A message fragment — find every time someone said something specific.
• A combined query (user: word) — drill down to a chatter's takes on a specific topic.

Results render as a flat list with timestamps. Click any result to seek the player to that moment and switch back to Live chat to read the context around it.

How chat is stored

For the curious: the chat is fetched once at VoD-ingest time by TwitchDownloaderCLI chatdownload and stored two ways in parallel:

1. A canonical chat.json.gz in S3 — the full TwitchDownloader-format file, kept as an immutable archive.
2. A Postgres ChatMessage table keyed by (streamId, messageId) with a (streamId, offset) btree and a trigram GIN index on message. The editor's live-chat scroll, the activity-graph aggregation, the search panel, and the chat renderer all read from this single source — the renderer slices out the exact [start, end] window it needs with one indexed SELECT instead of pulling shard files from S3.

This is why the chat panel is instant the moment you open a VoD whose chat finished ingesting — there is no live-fetch from Twitch involved.