Free Windows tools that record TikTok and Instagram live streams by themselves and download posts, stories, Snapchat and YouTube.
🎬 Phantom Recorder
A free Windows program that watches social media accounts and saves what they post. One file — no installation, no Python, ffmpeg is already inside.
It does the one thing you cannot do by hand: be there at the right moment. A livestream is gone when it ends, a story after 24 hours — so it sits in the tray and catches them while you do something else.
What it does, in four groups
📡 Watch
- Recording starts by itself the moment a watched account goes live — TikTok and Instagram
- The stream is copied through untouched, not re-encoded, and written as it arrives, so a dropped connection still leaves a file that plays
🤖 Automatic
- Story Watch saves new Instagram stories before the 24 hours are up
- Snap Watcher does the same for public Snapchat profiles, and needs no account at all
⬇️ Download
- TikTok · Instagram · Snapchat · YouTube — posts, stories, highlights, spotlights
- Profile pictures at full size, not the cropped preview
- Every result is a tile with its thumbnail, resolution and post date, so you see what you are about to save before you save it
- Narrow a whole profile to a period — the last week, the last month — and hide what you already have
📚 Archive
- The Library lists everything you kept — what, from whom, how big, when. Searchable, and exportable to CSV
Getting started
Unpack the pinned archive and double-click it.
Snapchat needs no account, TikTok works without one for a while, Instagram wants one for stories and live. Signing in uses a separate browser profile — your own is never opened or read.
What the server is for
- Downloads — every version pinned with its SHA-256 checksum
- Announcements when a new version is out, with what actually changed in it
- Help when something does not work, from the person who wrote it
- Bugs and requests — what gets suggested here often lands in the next update; that is where most of the feature list came from
> Please only use it for material you are allowed to save — your own, or content you have the uploader's consent for. Keeping a copy and passing it on are two different things.