Instant Replay is the core feature that makes Flashback useful even when you forget to hit record. The engine runs silently in the background, continuously filling a fixed-size ring buffer in RAM with compressed video and audio from your monitor or game window. When something worth keeping happens, press Alt+F8 and Flashback materialises the buffer as an MP4 on disk — no action needed before the play.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/CaramelHQ/Flashback/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
How it works
Flashback captures frames from your monitor or detected game window using Windows Graphics Capture (WGC) and encodes them to H.264 in real time. Instead of writing frames directly to a file, the replay engine maintains a rolling ring buffer in memory. The buffer is sized to hold the exact duration you configured. When new frames arrive, they overwrite the oldest ones — the buffer always contains the last N seconds, no more. When you save a replay, Flashback drains the ring buffer, muxes the kept frames into a properly timestamped MP4, and writes it to your clips folder (Videos\Flashback\Clips\). The buffer keeps rolling during the save, so you will not miss anything happening on screen while the file is being written.
Enabling Instant Replay
Open Flashback
Launch Flashback from the Start Menu or the system-tray icon. The main window opens to the home screen.
Toggle Instant Replay on
Click the Instant Replay toggle in the top capture bar. The indicator turns active and the buffer begins filling immediately.
Instant Replay runs in dedicated background threads managed by Rust — it keeps running even when the Flashback window is hidden to the system tray. Closing the main window does not stop the buffer.
Buffer duration options
The ring buffer can hold between 30 seconds and 15 minutes of footage. Choose based on how far back you typically need to look and how much RAM you are willing to dedicate.30 seconds
Smallest memory footprint. Good for precise highlights where the moment is always near the end.
1 minute
The default. Covers most gameplay highlights comfortably.
2 – 3 minutes
Suitable for longer fights, team plays, or speedrun segments.
5 – 15 minutes
Maximum coverage. Use for strategy games or long streaks where timing is unpredictable.
| Label | Duration |
|---|---|
| 00:30 | 30 seconds |
| 01:00 | 1 minute |
| 02:00 | 2 minutes |
| 03:00 | 3 minutes |
| 05:00 | 5 minutes |
| 10:00 | 10 minutes |
| 15:00 | 15 minutes |
Saving a replay
Press Alt+F8 at any time while the buffer is active. Flashback saves everything currently in the buffer — up to the configured duration — as a single MP4 file. The saved clip is:- Encoded in H.264 inside an MP4 container
- Placed in
Videos\Flashback\Clips\with a timestamp filename such asFlashback_2025-01-15_21-04-37.mp4 - Immediately visible in the Clip Library
Overlay toast notification
When a replay is saved, a small toast notification appears in the upper-right corner of your primary monitor. The notification is rendered in a transparent, always-on-top Tauri overlay window that is fully click-through and non-focusable, so it never interrupts your game or steals keyboard focus. It dismisses itself automatically after a short delay.The overlay repositions itself to the upper-right corner of your primary monitor before each toast, so it stays correct if you change resolution or display scaling between saves.
Behavior when the game is out of focus
Flashback continues capturing even when your game is minimised or loses focus. While the game window is not in the foreground, the capture pipeline renders a blurred version of the last captured frame (Gaussian blur via Direct2D) with the Flashback logo overlaid, so the buffer continues filling without a black gap in the footage.The out-of-focus card is rendered internally by Flashback’s Direct2D compositor — your game does not need to be visible or actively drawing frames for the buffer to remain active.
Stopping Instant Replay
Click the Instant Replay toggle again to stop the buffer. The in-memory footage is discarded; any clips you have already saved remain on disk.Tips for choosing buffer size
Match your game type
Fast-paced shooters with short, decisive moments are well served by a 1–2 minute buffer. Strategy or RPG sessions with slow build-ups benefit from 5–15 minutes.
Consider your bitrate
A 5-minute buffer at 1080p60 high quality holds significantly more data than the same buffer at 720p30. Check estimated sizes in Capture Settings before committing to a long duration.
Use with game detection
When game detection is active, Flashback automatically targets the game window instead of the full monitor, which is more efficient and avoids capturing overlays or taskbars.
Keep the tray icon visible
The system-tray icon shows whether the buffer is active. Double-click it to reopen the Flashback window and confirm replay status at a glance.