Stream Highlight Logger

The 4-hour VOD problem

Every streamer knows the pain: a four-hour broadcast contains maybe six minutes of genuinely great moments — the clutch play, the hilarious fail, the perfect reaction — and finding them later means scrubbing through the entire VOD at 2x speed, hoping your memory of "it was somewhere in the middle" is right. Editors charge by the hour, and every hour they spend hunting is an hour not spent cutting. The professional answer is logging: marking timestamps live, as they happen, with a note about what each one was. Broadcast television has done this for decades with loggers sitting next to the director. This tool puts that same workflow in your browser with zero install, zero accounts and zero cost — one keypress per highlight, and the edit practically assembles itself.

Built for the middle of a stream

Logging tools fail when they demand attention during the moments that matter. That's why this logger is deliberately minimal: a giant timer you can read from across the room, one enormous MARK button, and a single optional note field. The M hotkey works globally on the page, so you can keep the logger in a side monitor or a background tab and mark without looking away from the game. Pause handles bathroom breaks and BRB screens honestly — the clock stops, so your timestamps stay aligned with the actual VOD. And fullscreen mode turns any spare display into a dedicated logging dashboard. The whole interface is designed around a single constraint: marking a highlight must take less than one second and zero thought.

From marks to YouTube chapters

Your marks become genuinely useful the moment the stream ends. The YouTube-chapters export formats them exactly the way YouTube wants: timestamps followed by titles, starting at 00:00. Paste the block into your video description and YouTube converts it into clickable chapters — which viewers love, and which Google increasingly surfaces directly in search results as "key moments". Chapters also lift average view duration on long VODs, because viewers who can navigate stay instead of bouncing. The CSV export serves a different master: hand it to your editor (or import it into a spreadsheet) and every highlight is a row with an exact timestamp and your note about what happened. Either way, the six minutes of gold are found in seconds, not hours.

A logging habit that compounds

The streamers who get the most from logging treat it as a reflex, not a chore. Mark liberally — a false positive costs one second, a missed moment costs a clip forever. Develop a tiny note vocabulary and stick to it: "clutch", "fail", "chat", "lore", "clip" lets you (or an editor) filter a 40-mark session in seconds. Review marks right after the stream while the context is fresh, and delete the duds — a tight list of 8 great marks beats a noisy list of 30. Over weeks, your mark history becomes a content map: you'll see which moments your audience clips, which games produce the best highlights, and where your streams consistently peak. That's not just editing efficiency — it's programming intelligence for your channel. The shortest marks often travel furthest as GIFs: when a moment runs only a few seconds, turn the clip into a looping GIF and it can be posted anywhere.