wtf is vestige?

Vestige is a Mac app that acts as a replay buffer for gameplay, similar to the instant replay feature PC gamers get from tools like ShadowPlay. It sits in the menu bar, watches for games running on your Mac, and continuously keeps the last few seconds or minutes of gameplay in memory. When something worth keeping happens, you press a hotkey and Vestige turns that buffered footage into a local MP4 file. The app is built natively for macOS using Apple's ScreenCaptureKit for capture, VideoToolbox for hardware video encoding, AVFoundation for writing video files, and SwiftUI for the interface. Because the replay buffer stays in memory rather than being written to disk continuously, saving a clip is a quick operation rather than a full re encode of long recorded footage. Features include automatic detection of games you are playing, replay lengths from thirty seconds up to ten minutes with custom options, rebindable keyboard shortcuts, hardware accelerated encoding in either HEVC or H.264, optional system audio and microphone capture with the microphone off by default, and built in compression presets sized for sharing clips on Discord. A clip library lets you search, favorite, sort, and rename saved clips. Vestige requires macOS 14 or later and a Mac with hardware video encoding, with Apple silicon recommended. You can install it by downloading a DMG file, which is not notarized by Apple so macOS will show a security warning the first time you open it, or you can build the app yourself from source using a provided build script. The privacy model is straightforward: there are no accounts, no cloud syncing, no telemetry, no advertising, and no network code anywhere in the app, so nothing about your gameplay or clips ever leaves your Mac. Command line diagnostic tools are included for checking permissions, audio, and the capture pipeline if something is not working. The project is licensed under MIT.