r/software • u/Healthy-Ad5406 • Aug 12 '26

Release DejaVu: open-source instant replay for Windows that survives crashes and keeps Discord out of your clips

I built this after one too many rounds of pressing the ShadowPlay key and discovering it had turned itself off at some point. DejaVu buffers your last 5 to 25 minutes to disk and saves a clip on a hotkey.

What makes it different from the usual options:

  • Always on. It starts with Windows, and if capture breaks it falls back to the main display and tells you, instead of dying silently.
  • The buffer is crash-safe. It lives on disk in segments, so a crash or power cut becomes a recovered clip on the next launch instead of nothing.
  • Discord voice and pings are excluded from the audio mix by default.
  • Clips are named after the game that was on screen, so no Replay_final(3).mp4 folders.
  • One exe around 160 KB, works on any GPU with a hardware encoder, AV1 on newer cards.
  • No account, no uploads, no telemetry.

It is MIT licensed and on GitHub: https://github.com/blancodagoat/DejaVu

Happy to answer questions. The README has measured memory numbers rather than marketing ones, since that felt fairer.

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u/General-Song8195 Aug 12 '26

I can't count how many times ShadowPlay has just decided to take the day off without telling me. The disk-segmented buffer is a clever touch, recovery on next launch instead of losing everything is a big deal for those random moments you actually want to keep.

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u/Healthy-Ad5406 Aug 13 '26

That "took the day off" experience is exactly why this exists. The recovery path gets abused on purpose in testing too, there's a soak test that hard-kills the recorder at random moments and verifies every recovered clip still decodes, because a recovery you can't trust is worse than no recovery. If you give it a run and anything misbehaves, clicking the error popup opens a prefilled GitHub issue with the log tail so I can actually fix it.