1.5.0

Final update. Final words.

If you're reading this with a clip folder full of moments Rewind saved — thank you. That was the point of all of it: your gameplay, your drive, no account, no server, nobody in between.

I started Rewind because I was frustrated with existing capture tools and went looking for an alternative. I found Revidi, used it for a few weeks, and became frustrated with its business model: local use was advertised as free, but the local editor was paywalled to upsell the $5 subscription. It also lacked 120 FPS recording, and I had privacy concerns about its repeated network scanning. At the time, I couldn’t find another tool that met my needs, so Revidi became one of my inspirations. I’ve never pretended otherwise.

Since then, Revidi has added free local editing and 120 FPS support, addressing the two main things that motivated me to build Rewind. However, after facing DMCA threats, being publicly called a liar and a copycat, and being accused of cloning someone else’s hard work, I’ve decided to bring the project to an end. This entire situation has caused me genuine mental stress, and continuing development is no longer worth the toll it’s taking on my well-being.

Now that Revidi offers the features I originally wanted, I see little reason to keep going through all this. I’ll release one final update and then step away. The repository will remain public, and the source code will remain free to use. The full story and timelinecan be found on my profile’s main page. I started this project to solve a problem for myself, learned a lot along the way, and I’m ready to move on.

I'm stepping away now. The repository stays up, and everything here — engine, editor, themes, this very sentence — is yours to take further. If a feature I never built is the thing that would make you fork it, that's the licence working as intended.

Play. Capture. Keep.

Rewind 1.5.0 — the final release. Development ends here

• Screenshot editor — click any screenshot to crop it and adjust brightness, contrast and saturation. Live preview, Revert crop to undo, and saving overwrites the original after a confirm.
• Themes — Graphite, Terminal and Grotesk, each with its own interface font. Switch from the palette button in the titlebar.
• screen recordings on scaled displays. On a monitor at 200% scaling (and similar), recordings captured a zoomed quarter of the screen instead of all of it. Capture is now fitted from the source's real frame size.
• A crash loop when the engine reinitialised mid-switch — capture changes during a restart no longer wedge the buffer.
• Elevated games dropped from capture — a game running as administrator is no longer mistaken for "exited".
• Microphone picker — every input is listed by name, including what Windows Default resolves to, and a device is never captured twice. This was the cause of "my microphone is not detected" reports and doubled audio.

Goodnight

1.4.1

Hotfix.

1.4.0

Rewind 1.4.0

The library gets a real folder structure, per-app audio actually works, and there is a
portable build for people who do not want an installer.

---

Your clips are now organised

<your location>\
└── Rewind\
    ├── Recordings\      continuous recordings
    ├── <Game>\          replay clips, one folder per game
    ├── Display Capture\ clips with no game
    ├── Screenshots\     every screenshot
    └── Compressed\      editor exports

No video file is left loose in Rewind\ any more. Recordings used to land in the same
per-game folder as clips; they now have their own, so a game's folder holds clips and
only clips.

Your existing library is moved for you, once, on the first launch of this version.
Recordings move into Recordings\, and any clip that had been left in the root moves
into its game's folder. Only files Rewind named itself (Replay …, Recording …) are
touched — anything else in that tree is left exactly where it is. Files in use are
skipped and stay visible in the old place.

Per-app audio works

Settings → Audio → Output lists the apps that are playing sound, each with its own
fader. Every one of those faders was greyed out in earlier versions — the panel asked
for a list that never filled in the "can this app be captured on its own" flag. Fixed;
set a level and that app is captured separately from the rest of the desktop.

Settings → Profiles: add your own

Four profiles, and now you can actually build them: Add profile and a duplicate
button per row, disabled once you are at four. Editing the active profile still applies
immediately.

Storage usage

Settings → Storage now shows what the library takes: Recordings, Clips, Screenshots,
Compressed, plus the free space left on the drive holding your clips. It measures the
folders themselves, so the number is the library, not whatever else is in the folder
you picked.

Also

• The panel shows itself after an update, even with Start minimized on, and the
  update popover says Updated to 1.4.0. A silent relaunch to the tray was
  indistinguishable from an update that failed.
• The editor's compressor starts off. The Compress box opens collapsed; turn it on
  when you want a smaller copy. Nothing changes about how it writes: always a new file
  in Compressed\, the original is never overwritten.
• Portable zip. Rewind-1.4.0-portable.zip — unpack it anywhere and run
  Rewind.exe. Same app, no installer, no registry entry. Settings and clips still live
  in the usual per-user places, and the in-app updater is off in a portable copy,
  because updating it would install a second one. Move up a version by downloading the
  new zip.
• Removed the "kept by the quick-clip hotkey" caption under the quick-clip length
  picker. The hotkey chip next to it already says which key it is.

---

The app still makes no network request unless you click Check for updates. No
telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting.

Windows x64 only. Unsigned, so SmartScreen warns on first run and on every update.

1.3.1

Rewind 1.3.1

Hotfix. In the 1.3.0 installer, every clip and recording came out black — a flat
black frame with working audio. It affected both replay clips and continuous
recordings, in Game Capture and Display mode alike, and it is fixed here.

---

Black clips, fixed

What happened. Monitor capture was using DXGI desktop duplication, which hands
back no frames at all when the capture process is not per-monitor DPI aware. The
packaged engine process ended up only system DPI aware, so the scene it rendered
had nothing in it: the engine log looked healthy (source created, frames drawn,
encoder started, file written) and the file itself was a uniform black frame.

Worth knowing if you hit it: the app's own Screenshot was still correct
throughout, because it captures through ffmpeg rather than the engine. A black clip
next to a correct screenshot was the tell.

The fix. Monitor capture now uses Windows Graphics Capture — the same method
the window source already used — which does not depend on DPI awareness at all. It is
the recommended capture path on Windows 11, and it also handles HDR and
multi-plane-overlay content better than duplication did. Nothing else about capture
changed: same resolution, same cursor, same profiles.

Anyone on 1.3.0 should update; clips recorded with 1.3.0 cannot be recovered.

Also in this build

• The Record row fades out while the buffer is off. Continuous recording runs on
  the buffer's replay chain, so with the buffer stopped there is nothing to record —
  the row is now visibly unavailable instead of failing when clicked.
• The "Auto detect launched game" card is gone from Settings → Capture Source.
  Picking Game Capture already means auto-detect, so the card only duplicated the
  mode button. Pinning a specific window is unchanged.

---

No other behaviour changed. The app still makes no network request unless you click
Check for updates, and this release is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen warns on
first run.

1.3.0

Rewind 1.3.0

The clip editor became a real editor, compression moved onto the GPU, and a
full-repository audit fixed twenty defects — including two that could leave a button
stuck and one that could hang the library on an unreachable drive.

Everything below since the last public release, 1.1.0. The 1.2.0 line was
developed and folded into this one.

---

The editor

• Trim, properly. Draggable in/out handles on the trim bar, and the mouse wheel
  over the bar scrubs the playhead. The first wheel notch lands immediately and the
  rest coalesce per frame, so scrubbing is responsive without flooding the player.
• A waveform for every audio lane, plus a combined clip-volume lane, drawn from
  real peaks decoded in the main process — not a fake bar graph.
• Per-track volume with live monitoring. Each lane's fader is heard as you move
  it, through the renderer's own gain graph, so you mix by ear instead of guessing.
• A fader at zero is the mute. The separate clip-mute control is gone; the mic
  icon in the panel reports effective silence honestly, including at zero volume.
• Save a copy / Replace original. The two footer buttons now say what they do
  (they were "Save as Copy" / "Overwrite"), and each carries a tooltip naming the
  target file.
• The clip's own size is in the editor header, next to the file name.
• Copy clip from the rail's card menu puts the file on the Windows clipboard, so
  it can be pasted directly into a chat.

Compress (was "Export")

• One box, one button. GIF export is gone entirely. There is one Compress
  box with an On/Off toggle, Low / Medium / High quality, and a single
  Compress to new file button.
• Quality is a fraction of the clip's own bitrate — 40% / 65% / 90% — so a
  compressed copy can never come out larger than the source. That was a real bug
  before: the old fixed bits-per-pixel model let "High" exceed the original on an
  efficiently-encoded recording.
• Encoded on the GPU. At the first compress Rewind probes the bundled ffmpeg for
  a usable hardware encoder — NVENC, then AMF, then QSV — and uses it in a single
  VBR pass; libx264 with a two-pass ABR remains as the CPU fallback. Measured on an
  RTX 5080: a 58-second 1440p120 clip compresses in ~28 seconds, where the CPU
  two-pass path took minutes.
• Settings → Encoder → Compression Threads (Auto / 2–12) caps the CPU fallback,
  decoder included, for machines that need the cores for the game.
• Output always keeps the source resolution, and copies land in
  Rewind/Compressed/ — shown in the library as its own source, so a compressed copy
  is never confused with the original.
• The readout is the truth: ≈ X MB · Y% smaller, computed from the same
  arithmetic the encoder is given, against the original file's size.
• Nothing partial survives. A failed or cancelled compress deletes its output.

Profiles

• Profiles are user-defined: add, duplicate, remove, and save the current live
  settings into the active profile. Up to four, with column headers.
• The profile-cycle hotkey is removed. Profiles switch from the panel's numbered
  buttons or from Settings → Profiles.
• Switching a profile writes into the live engine, not just the settings file,
  and costs only the cheapest rebuild the change needs: a length change restarts the
  chain, a quality change rebuilds it, a frame-rate change takes the engine down and
  back up. A paused buffer stays paused, and a recording in flight is finished and
  registered rather than dropped.
• A failed switch puts the stored profile back.

The panel

• The clip rail scrolls with a visible thin scrollbar, and its lists are
  memoized so a big library does not re-sort on every interaction.
• Storage is the new name for the old Replay settings section, and it owns the
  Data doors (open the clip folder, the log folder, the exclusion list).
• Discord and GitHub buttons in the titlebar.
• The unreliable hover-scrub preview on the rail is gone.

Capture and engine

• A display resolution change no longer needs a restart. Rewind stops the replay
  chain, resets the video context, re-fits the source and restarts — verified in both
  directions at 1080p and 4K, with the buffer live. (OBS refuses a video reset while
  an output holds the context; the old code asked anyway and silently kept the old
  canvas, which is what produced black or half-screen clips.)
• Startup is quicker. Stopping a buffer that had never run no longer waits out the
  stop-signal timeout before capture can start.
• Smaller and quieter: the audio service was folded into the main process, the
  panel stops working while hidden, and the packaged engine no longer ships modules
  Rewind never loads (the browser engine, unused plugins, debug symbols). The
  installer is 107 MB, down from 189 MB in 1.1.0.

1.1.0

Rewind 1.1.0 — the first release with the new interface, and a set of correctness and size fixes underneath it.

New interface

• A landscape window: the capture deck (buffer dial, save, record, screenshot, buffer length) beside a rail of recent clips and screenshots you can drag wider or narrower.
• Settings reorganized as a signal-path view — Capture, Audio, Encoder, Replay, Hotkeys, System — with the encoder, frame rate, resolution, buffer and engine state always visible.
• Hover a clip to scrub it; saving slides the new card in.

Clearer feedback

• Hotkey popups name the action and the key ("Clip saved — Alt + 1"), and a failure shows the engine's own reason instead of a generic message.
• The shortcut chips on the deck are editable from the main screen.

Safer recording

• Installing an update while a recording is running is now refused rather than cutting the recording off.
• Quitting during a long recording waits for it to be stitched and registered (up to 3 minutes) instead of timing out and leaving an unlabelled file.

Smaller Footprint

• The installer is ~190 MB (from ~220 MB) and the installed app ~635 MB (from ~723 MB): the redundant ffprobe binary is gone, unused Electron locales are dropped, and the installer uses maximum compression.

Perfomance & Stability

• Pausing the buffer now stops the capture source too, instead of leaving it copying frames in the background.
• The NVENC preset and the frame-rate setting now actually reach the encoder.
• Changing display resolution mid-capture no longer leaves a black half-screen or a cropped picture.
• The editor opens the clip you asked for, rename keeps the thumbnail, and a settings file that cannot be read fails loudly instead of silently dropping changes.
• Choosing a save location creates the Rewind folder there immediately and shows the path files actually land in.

Your clips, settings and hotkeys carry over. Updates are still only checked when you press Check for updates — nothing downloads on its own.

1.0.1

bugfixes.

1.0.0

Enjoy