The first thing I’ve built that isn’t a plugin. Windows gives you a snipping tool and a clipboard; everything after that — marking up what you captured, recording a short clip instead of writing three paragraphs, getting it to somebody as a link — is usually someone else’s subscription. Kadrr is that whole loop in one tray app.
The capture, without the retake
Most tools fire the shot the moment you release the mouse, and a wrong edge means starting the drag over. Kadrr keeps the selection on screen with eight handles and a confirm bar placed where the pointer already is, so a bad edge is a nudge. Click instead of drag and it adopts the window under the cursor. Escape steps back one level at a time — the selection first, then the capture.
Recording, measured rather than guessed
The recorder runs through ffmpeg on the GPU: ddagrab into NVENC, with the pixel format deliberately left alone, because naming it forces a CPU colour conversion that triples the cost. Measured on one machine at 1080p30 over eight seconds:
| pipeline | CPU | frames kept |
|---|---|---|
| ddagrab → NVENC | 2.2 s | 239 / 240 |
| the same, plus an explicit pixel format | 7.8 s | 238 / 240 |
| the conventional gdigrab path | 10.7 s | 219 / 240 |
The recording HUD is marked excluded from capture, so it is visible to you and absent from the file. That has one side effect worth knowing: an ordinary screenshot cannot see it either, which makes “is the HUD in frame?” harder to test than it sounds.
Status
Finished and in daily use, not yet on sale.