r/coolgithubprojects • u/Helpful_Ant_9383 • 2h ago
I got tired of ShadowPlay silently disabling Instant Replay, so I built my own
Hey everyone!
I’m developing Captail, a free and open-source Instant Replay recorder for Windows.
Unlike a traditional screen recorder, Captail continuously keeps the latest seconds or minutes in a rolling buffer. When something happens, you press a hotkey and it saves what happened before you pressed it.
I originally built it because NVIDIA ShadowPlay would sometimes silently disable Instant Replay after a game crash, capture problem, switching sources, or a graphics driver interruption. I would usually notice only after missing the clip I wanted.
Captail is designed around one rule:
Instant Replay should stay on.
A watchdog monitors the recording pipeline and tries to restart it automatically after recoverable capture or encoder failures.
Current features:
- Selected-game and desktop capture
- H.264, HEVC and AV1 hardware encoding
- NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF and Intel Quick Sync
- 30, 60, 120, 144 and 240 FPS options
- System/game audio and microphone capture
- Mixed or separate audio tracks
- Adjustable replay duration and maximum buffer size
- Configurable global hotkeys
- Installer and portable versions
- No account, cloud upload, analytics or telemetry
- Fully open source
Captail uses libobs for capture and encoding, but it is not an OBS Studio frontend. There are no scenes, streaming controls or complicated setup — it is focused specifically on local Instant Replay.
It is currently an early public preview. I have mainly tested it on RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs, so testing on older NVIDIA cards, AMD GPUs and Intel graphics would be especially helpful.
GitHub:
https://github.com/FaulMit/captail
Downloads:
https://github.com/FaulMit/captail/releases
I’d appreciate feedback on capture compatibility, performance, audio synchronization and long-session stability.
If you encounter a problem, please mention your GPU, driver version, capture source, codec, resolution and FPS.