A lightweight, open-source instant replay recorder for Windows — built as a drop-in replacement for NVIDIA ShadowPlay's Instant Replay feature.
ShadowWarp runs silently in the background, continuously buffering your screen using FFmpeg and NVENC hardware encoding. Press a hotkey, get the clip. No GeForce Experience required, no telemetry, no bloat.
Grab the latest installer from the Releases page.
- Instant Replay Buffer — continuously records your screen in the background; configurable from 5 seconds up to 15 minutes
- One-Hotkey Save — press your capture hotkey (default
Alt+F10) at any moment to save the last N minutes as an.mp4 - NVIDIA NVENC Hardware Encoding — uses your GPU for near-zero CPU overhead; falls back to software x264 if needed
- Dual Audio Capture — records system audio (Stereo Mix / VB-Cable) and microphone simultaneously, mixed into one track
- System Tray Integration — lives quietly in the tray; save replays without ever opening the window
- Launch on Boot — optional auto-start so the buffer is always rolling
- Configurable Quality — set your codec, framerate (30 / 60 / 120 FPS), and bitrate independently
- Custom Output Folder — saves clips wherever you want
ShadowWarp uses FFmpeg's segment muxer to write your screen into a rolling series of 30-second .ts chunks on disk. When you hit the hotkey, it concatenates only the chunks within your configured buffer window into a final .mp4 using stream-copy — no re-encoding, so saving is nearly instant.
Global hotkeys are captured system-wide via uiohook-napi, so they work even when the app is minimized or hidden in the tray.
NVIDIA ShadowPlay has degraded into something barely functional. Between forced GeForce Experience installs, broken overlays, random recording failures, laggy UI, and constant driver-level issues — it became genuinely unusable. ShadowWarp exists because all we ever wanted was a background buffer and a hotkey to save a clip, and ShadowPlay stopped being able to do even that reliably.
Prerequisites: Node.js, Bun, an NVIDIA GPU (for NVENC) or any GPU for software fallback.
bun install
bun run devBuild installer:
bun run buildOutput is in the release/ directory.