clipd

A lightweight game clipper that doesn't suck. Written in Rust.

You just did something ridiculous in a game and it's already gone. clipd sits in your tray quietly holding the last few minutes of your screen in memory — hit a hotkey and the last N seconds drop onto your disk as an MP4. That's the whole app.

Yeah, ShadowPlay, AMD Radeon, Xbox Game Bar and Medal all technically do this already. They're also each locked to one GPU brand, buried inside a 300 MB control panel, mangling your mic audio, or nagging you to make an account and upload your clips to their site. clipd is the ~9 MB version that clips and then leaves you alone.

The good parts

• It won't cost you frames. The heavy lifting runs on your GPU's dedicated video encoder (NVENC on NVIDIA, AMF on AMD) — the same silicon ShadowPlay and OBS lean on — so your game keeps the actual GPU. On the test machine it sits under 2% CPU while buffering, roughly 0% of the gaming GPU, and the clip is on disk in under a second.
• Press one key, it's saved. A global hotkey grabs the last N seconds. Want the opposite? A second mode records the next N minutes straight to disk.
• It won't get you banned. No injection, no hooks, no overlay — it just uses Windows' own screen-capture API. Nothing for anti-cheat to freak out about, and it can't crash the game it's recording.
• Your mic gets its own track. So "my voice was blowing out the mic" is a post-processing fix, not a ruined clip. Live meters show the mic's actually working — unlike a certain built-in Windows recorder.
• Zero runtime dependencies. One ~9 MB exe. No FFmpeg DLLs, no VC++ redist, no bundled browser, no updater lurking in the background. The config is a plain text file it never rewrites behind your back.
• When something breaks, it says so. Every save attempt is logged with what happened. No clip? The reason's in the log, and the tray icon changes colour the second anything goes wrong. No more "wait, was it even recording?"

Not tied to NVIDIA, either — it's built on Windows' own encoder API instead of a vendor SDK, so it isn't locked to one GPU brand the way ShadowPlay (NVIDIA-only) and Radeon (AMD-only) are. So far it's run cleanly on both NVIDIA (RTX 4050 laptop) and AMD (Radeon RX 9060 XT); Intel and a wider spread of cards are still to come.

Status & roadmap

Alpha, preparing for a private beta. The core capture → save engine is built and hardware-validated on the main test machine (RTX 4050 laptop, hybrid graphics), and an early test on an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT ran clean too. The settings/status window and multi-track audio are built and merged; their hardware-acceptance pass is underway. A wider card spread (more AMD, Intel Arc) and Windows 10 come next — that's what the beta is for.

Working today (hardware-validated on the test machine) — screen/window capture, GPU-accelerated H.264 encode with separate mic + game audio, the in-memory replay buffer, the sub-second hotkey save, record-to-disk mode, and the tray app (status icons, menu, logs, watchdog warning, start-with-Windows).

Built, final testing in progress — the settings & live-status window (which is optional — the recorder runs perfectly fine whether or not you ever open it), live audio meters, a recent-clips list, click-to-rebind hotkeys, and per-app audio splitting (game / voice-chat / other / mic).

Planned — broader GPU coverage (more AMD cards, Intel Arc) and Windows 10, AV1 + HDR + 120 fps, and release polish (code-signed builds, winget, an installer). Full detail in the milestone tracker.

What it deliberately does not do

These aren't missing features — they're the whole point. clipd is the clip button, not a content suite:

• No overlay and no game injection — anti-cheat safety and zero risk of crashing your game.
• No editor and no uploader. Every OS ships a trimmer; every site wants your clips. clipd gives you a clean MP4 and gets out of the way.
• No accounts, no telemetry, no auto-update phoning home.
• No streaming, no webcam, no "AI auto-highlights."
• Windows 10 1903+ / Windows 11 only in v1. (Windows' borderless-window capture needs 1903.)

Honest limitations (worth knowing before you rely on it)

• Exclusive-fullscreen games can't be captured as a single window; clipd falls back to recording the whole monitor. Running the game in borderless is recommended — it also keeps the global hotkey working, since a few exclusive-fullscreen titles swallow it.
• DRM-protected video (e.g. Netflix with hardware DRM) records as black frames. That's Windows protecting the content, not a bug.
• HDR is currently converted down to SDR (like ShadowPlay does by default); true HDR passthrough is a later milestone.
• Pause stops keeping new footage but keeps capturing — it's a privacy control, not a way to drop resource use to zero.
• Per-app audio splitting has real edges: in-game voice can't be separated out, and players/uploads only ever hear the combined mix. It needs Windows 10 2004+.

The full, unvarnished list is in LIMITATIONS.md.

Get it & build

clipd is free software distributed as source (GPL-3.0). Until signed release builds land, you build it yourself — clone the repo or grab a source archive from tags/releases. You'll need the Rust MSVC toolchain (the exact version is pinned in rust-toolchain.toml and installed by rustup automatically) and just:

just release  # locked, stripped release build → target/release/clipd.exe
              # (prints the binary size against the 10 MB budget)

First-run help and a starting config are in dist/ (QUICKSTART.txt and config.template.toml). clipd --check-config validates and prints your effective configuration.

For developers

clipd is a single native binary in Rust — no async runtime, no FFmpeg, no vendor encoder SDKs. Four long-lived worker threads plus the tray thread talk over bounded channels:

• capture — Windows Graphics Capture → D3D11 VideoProcessor BGRA→NV12. Pixels stay on the GPU and are never copied into system RAM.
• encode — Media Foundation hardware H.264 MFT + dual-AAC, driving NVENC/AMF/QuickSync under one API.
• audio — WASAPI loopback + mic → rubato resample → MF AAC.
• buffer/mux — a ring of compressed packets capped by both duration and bytes; a save walks back to a keyframe, rebases both tracks against one origin, and writes a crash-safe fragmented MP4 atomically.

Everything is timestamped in one clock domain: QueryPerformanceCounter, in 100 ns ticks. The normative specs live in clipper-devpack/devpack/ — 02-AV-SYNC-SPEC.md (the frozen timestamp/sync spec) overrides everything. Internal engineering notes and the decision log are under docs/.

The dev loop:

just check    # cargo check + clippy -D warnings + fmt --check   (the gate)
just test     # unit tests (nextest, or cargo test)
just run      # debug build + run with dev config + verbose tracing

See CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a PR.

License

GPL-3.0-only. The source is free software; the compiled binary may be sold. See docs/DECISIONS.md for the rationale.