v3.4.0 — Record only the game, and updates

Windowed games are recorded without the desktop around them, Clipper can now update itself, and opening it twice no longer breaks the copy that was already running.

Record only the game

In Only in games mode, a game running in a window rather than full-screen used to be recorded along with everything around it — the title bar, the taskbar, whatever was open beside it. Now the recorder takes just the inside of the game's window and scales it up to fill the clip. A window of a different shape gets black bars rather than being stretched, and moving or resizing the window mid-game is followed straight away without losing the replay buffer.

It is on by default, under When to record in Settings. It is the same capture as before, cropped in the step that already scales the picture, so there is no second capture running. Two things to know: anything on top of the game — a notification, a window you drag over it — is still in the clip, because it is on screen in that spot; and a windowed game on a different monitor from the one you record is recorded whole-screen as before. Full-screen games are unaffected.

Updates

Clipper now checks this page when it starts and every six hours after — a few kilobytes from GitHub, with nothing about you or your clips. When there is a newer version it shows you these notes and waits. Nothing is downloaded until you press Update now, because the download is about 130 MB and updating restarts the app, which starts the replay buffer over. Later leaves an Update button in the titlebar; Skip this version stays quiet until the next one. If Clipper is in the tray, you get one Windows notification instead.

• Installed: the new installer runs, updates Clipper in place and starts it again. Settings and clips are untouched.
• Portable: the new exe is saved in the same folder as the one you run (Clipper 3.4.0.exe becomes Clipper 3.5.0.exe), Clipper restarts into it and deletes the old one. Start with Windows follows it.

Every download is checked against the checksum GitHub recorded for the file, and one that does not match is thrown away rather than run. Check for updates in Settings turns the background checks off; Check now beside it still works.

This is the first version that can do this, so getting here from 3.3.1 or earlier is still a manual download — one last time.

Opening Clipper twice

Double-clicking the portable exe while Clipper was already open did more harm than it looked like. The second launch correctly handed focus back to the first, but on its way out it deleted files the running copy was using — ffmpeg and the recorder among them — so thumbnails, exports and instant replay could quietly stop working until Clipper was restarted. Each launch now unpacks into a folder of its own, and a second launch simply brings the open window forward. In both versions, the second launch now stops the moment it knows Clipper is already open, instead of starting to build a window and tray icon of its own first.