v3.2.0 — Recording on demand, and hotkeys on your wheel

Clipper can now record from one press to the next as well as keep the last minute, and both of them can be bound to a button on your wheel.

Recording on demand

Settings → Replay & recording → Record on demand adds a second hotkey — Alt+F9 by default,
ShadowPlay's own — that records everything from one press to the next. The recording lands in a
Recordings folder inside your clips folder, which the grid shows as a category of its own. A
Record button in the titlebar does the same, and counts the time while it runs; a silent
notification tells you it started, since a hotkey pressed over a game gives no other sign.

It is the replay's own stream, written twice. The recorder already encodes your screen once for
the buffer; a recording takes a copy of those same frames. So it costs no GPU beyond what the replay
already spends, it is at exactly the replay's quality, screen and audio settings, and the replay
hotkey keeps working in the middle of a recording — press it an hour in and you still get the last
minute as a clip.

It records the screen, whatever is on it: Only in games and the folder-per-game sorting belong to
the replay. It works with instant replay switched off, too. Then nothing runs until you press the
hotkey, and the first second or so goes to starting the encoder; with replay on, the recording
starts on the keypress.

Nothing is lost if something goes wrong. A recording is written as a stream that is valid up to
its last byte and turned into an MP4 when you stop — copied, not re-encoded, so it takes about as
long as copying the file. If the recorder is killed or the machine loses power mid-recording, the
next start finishes the file. A screen switched to HDR or turned off for a moment does not end it
either: it waits, then carries on in the same file with the gap closed.

Buttons on your wheel

Each hotkey now has an Alternative bind under it, and that one can be a button on a sim racing
wheel, a button box, a flight stick or a gamepad, as well as a second key combination. Press
Change, then the button. Your hands are on the wheel when the moment happens.

Buttons and the D-pad on the rim both work, read from the device's own description of itself rather
than from a list of supported wheels. A bind remembers the device by make and model, so it survives
unplugging it or moving it to another port, and the field tells you when the device is not
connected. The main hotkeys stay keyboard-only, so one bind always works with nothing plugged in.

It costs nothing until you bind a button. With one bound, a small background reader runs — measured
at about a third of a percent of one CPU core with a MOZA R5, whose base reports its position
hundreds of times a second even while it sits still.

Smaller things

• The settings tab is now Replay & recording. Quality, screen and audio are shared by both and
  stay editable while either one is on; the replay's own settings fade when replay is off.
• Turning instant replay off while recording on demand stays on clears the replay's buffer from
  disk instead of leaving it there.
• The tray menu gets Start recording / Stop recording, and its icon turns red while a
  recording runs.