ZeroClip
A zero-impact game clipper for Windows, written in Rust
Keeps the last few minutes of gameplay in memory and saves them with one hotkey, without touching the game, without copying frames off the GPU, and without losing the clip if the game crashes.
Highlights
- Anti-cheat safe by design: only public OS APIs, no injection, no hooks
- Zero-copy capture: frames go from the compositor to the hardware encoder without leaving VRAM
- GOP-aware DVR buffer and fragmented containers, so every clip decodes and survives a crash
Design
The ring buffer evicts whole GOPs, so every saved clip starts on a keyframe. Audio is evicted in step, so clips are never silent.
The watchdog is a state machine (drain → flush → re-init → resume) that steps down the codec ladder, AV1 → HEVC → H.264, when a GPU cannot keep up.
Trim and stitch work by stream copy with no re-encode, and keyframe snap points show on the timeline.
Structure
A Cargo workspace of small crates: zc-core (time, packets, DVR buffer, watchdog), zc-engine, zc-mux, zc-video, zc-audio, zc-input and zc-win. Platform code plugs into a platform-free core, which keeps the hard logic unit-testable.