How do you record a TikTok Live?

On iPhone, add Screen Recording to Control Centre (Settings → Control Centre), open the live, swipe down and tap the record dot. On Android, pull down the quick-settings shade and tap Screen record. It works and costs nothing, but you have to already be watching: you only capture from the moment you press record, your phone is tied up for the whole stream, and a call or notification can interrupt the file.

Open the live in a browser, add a Window Capture or Display Capture source in OBS, and hit Record. You get a clean, high-bitrate local file and your phone stays free. Same fundamental limit: OBS records what's on your screen right now, so you must be at the computer when the live begins, and the machine has to stay awake for the duration.

Tools such as Michele0303/tiktok-live-recorder pull the stream directly rather than filming your screen, so the output is the source video and audio instead of a re-encode. You run them yourself from a terminal, in Python. That means your own machine or server has to be running whenever the creator might go live, and you maintain it when TikTok changes something upstream.

A cloud recorder watches the creator's room from a server. You add the @handle once; when they go live, recording starts automatically from the first second with nothing of yours switched on. This is the only method that catches a live that started at 4 AM in another timezone, and the only one that captures the opening minutes you would otherwise miss while opening the app.

If you know when the live starts and you'll be watching anyway, screen recording is free and fine. If the creator goes live unpredictably, or the timezone is against you, or you want the first minutes rather than the middle, you need something server-side. TikMonitor Studio records the TikTokers you pick automatically and keeps the video for 30 days, with the gift and chat timeline lined up against it.