Chrono is lightweight clipping software for Windows that shares clips as links, the way Medal does. Press a hotkey to save the last 30 seconds (or whatever length you set), trim it, give it a title, and send a link anywhere.
- It finds your game on its own. Start a game and recording starts. Browsers, Discord, video players and other apps are left alone.
- On Windows 11 a game is recorded as its own window, so alt-tabbing to Discord or your desktop never puts them in a clip, and a minimized game shows its last frame. Windows 10 draws a yellow border around any window that is being captured, so there Chrono records the screen instead, only while the game is in front. It pauses when you alt-tab, and what you can still clip is what was recorded just before.
- Chrono lives in the system tray and draws no overlay.
- A hotkey only saves the clip to your PC. Uploading happens when you press the Upload button.
- The library has a trim editor, renaming, filters for game, date and uploaded or on this PC, and a Copy link button.
- There are no ads and no account.
These are Chrono's own measurements, taken on an i7-13700k, RTX 4080 OC, 64Gb DDR5, recording a 2560x1440 monitor at 60 FPS:
- Recording uses about 3 to 5% of one CPU core.
- In the tray with the window closed, Chrono uses about 19 MB of memory. With the window open it uses about 225 MB, and it goes back to 19 MB when you close it.
- Saving a clip at a smaller size (1080p, say) takes a few seconds and uses almost no CPU, because the graphics card does the resizing.
Chrono has not been benchmarked against Medal, and the effect on your game's frame rate has not been measured, so there is no comparison number here. Your results will depend on your PC.
The design keeps the work small:
- On NVIDIA cards, frames are captured and encoded on the graphics card and never pass through the CPU.
- One FFmpeg process writes the rolling buffer, so nothing restarts or piles up in the background.
- There is no in-game overlay and no hook injected into the game. Chrono reads the game's window through Windows' own capture API.
- The window is a web page that Chrono only creates while you are looking at it. Closed, it leaves just the tray icon.
- Resizing happens when you save a clip, so the game never pays for it while you play.
Chrono was built and measured on an RTX 4080. It has not been run on a GTX 1650 or a 30-series card, so what follows is designed from those measurements, not confirmed on that hardware.
- On a modest card (the GTX 10 and 16 series, RTX 20 series, RTX 3050 and 3060, and integrated graphics, for example) Chrono starts on a faster encoder setting. On the 4080 that took the video encoder from about 10% to 7% for the same file size and almost the same picture.
- Chrono watches how fast it is encoding. If it measures that your PC can't keep up, it switches to a faster encoder setting, restarts the recording, and tells you. It keeps the frame rate you chose. Frame rate is what matters most for load: 30 FPS halves what recording asks of the graphics card, so if 60 is still too much for your PC, Chrono says so and you can pick 30 FPS, or pick "Automatic, and lower the frame rate if needed" under Settings > Video > Recording load.
- If the graphics card's encoder won't start (an old NVIDIA driver, or another recording program using it), Chrono records on the processor instead and says why.
- Settings > Video > Recording load lets you pick Normal or Light yourself. Automatic is the default.
Diagnostics is off by default so the sidebar stays simple. Turn it on with Settings > App > Show Diagnostics and a Diagnostics page appears in the sidebar. It shows what Chrono is doing and what it costs while a game is recorded: the capture method, encoder, resolution and frame rate, bitrate, how much footage is buffered, processor and memory use, how busy the graphics card's video encoder and 3D engine are, encoding speed, dropped frames, and details of your PC. It also lists anything that looks wrong, in plain words.
Press Copy report to put it on your clipboard as text you can paste into a chat. The report has no name, folders, server address or key in it. Chrono never sends it anywhere by itself, unless you turn on Settings > Uploading > Send a diagnostics report when you save a clip, which sends this same report to your Chrono server every time a hotkey saves one, for whoever runs the server to look at. It needs a server address and key the same as uploading does, and it's off until you turn it on.
- Download
Chrono-Setup.exefrom the Releases page and run it. It installs for your user only, so it does not ask for admin rights. - Windows may show a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen, because Chrono is not code-signed. Click More info, then Run anyway.
- Chrono opens once so you can look around, then stays in the system tray (bottom right, near the clock). Click its icon to open the window.
FFmpeg and everything else Chrono needs is inside the installer. It runs on Windows 10 and 11. An NVIDIA card gives the lightest recording. AMD and Intel cards work but have had less testing.
To update, run the new Chrono-Setup.exe over the old one. You don't need to uninstall first. The installer closes Chrono if it is running, replaces the program files, and leaves your clips and settings alone.
Chrono also checks for a newer version itself, roughly once an hour, and shows the version at the top left as a button once one is out. Clicking it downloads the installer and runs it for you; Chrono closes so it can update, and you click through the same installer as above. Nothing downloads on its own. Turn this off in Settings > App > Check for updates if you'd rather update by hand.
If you prefer no installer, Chrono-win-x64.zip on the same page is a portable copy. Unzip it anywhere and run ChronoRecorder.exe.
To uninstall, use Windows Settings > Apps > Installed apps > Chrono. Your clips and settings stay on disk. Delete Videos\Chrono and %APPDATA%\Chrono if you want those gone too. For the portable copy, exit Chrono from the tray menu and delete its folder, after turning off Settings > App > Start Chrono with Windows if you had it on.
Start a game, then press:
| Keys | Saves |
|---|---|
| Ctrl + PageUp | the last 30 seconds |
| Ctrl + PageDown | the last 2 minutes |
A short chime plays and the clip appears in your Library. You can change the keys and lengths in Settings > Hotkeys. Any combination of up to three keys works, for example Ctrl + Shift + \.
If a game records as a black picture, open Settings > Video and set Capture games as to the monitor option.
Uploading needs a Chrono server, run by whoever gave you this app. In Settings > Uploading, enter the server address and upload key they send you (keep the key private). You can also set the username shown on your links; it starts as username. The address and key are blank in a fresh install. Then open a clip in the Library and press Upload. When it finishes, the link is on your clipboard, and uploaded clips keep a Copy link button.
Links do not expire. An uploaded clip stays on the server until you remove it.
Open an uploaded clip and press Remove upload to take it off the server. The link stops working and the clip stays on your PC. Delete removes the clip from your PC and, if it is also uploaded, asks whether to delete the cloud copy too.
You can only remove clips you uploaded yourself. When an upload starts, the server gives your copy of Chrono a secret for that clip, and removing or renaming it needs that secret as well as the upload key. Someone else who has the key and even knows a clip's address cannot remove it. Clips uploaded by an older version of Chrono have no secret, so only whoever runs the server can remove those.
Settings > Sound lists the same speakers and microphones as Windows Sound settings, so you can pick which ones to record. It also lets you make your microphone louder or quieter, with a live level bar. The microphone stays off until you turn it on.
| Clips | Videos\Chrono (change it in Settings) |
| Settings | %APPDATA%\Chrono\config.json |
| Library index | %APPDATA%\Chrono\library.json |
| Log, for bug reports | %LOCALAPPDATA%\Chrono\logs\chrono.log |
DEVELOPMENT.md explains how everything works, the build and test commands, and how to deploy the server (worker/, a Cloudflare Worker with R2 storage). To build the downloads, run powershell -File scripts\build-installer.ps1. It produces dist\Chrono-Setup.exe and the portable dist\Chrono-win-x64.zip.
Chrono includes FFmpeg (GPL) from gyan.dev. Its licence and source pointer sit beside it in the ffmpeg folder.