## What it is
capture-bypass is a Windows utility that defeats the screen-capture protection some applications apply to their windows — the flag that makes a window render as a black rectangle in screenshots and recordings. It ships as a multi-crate Rust workspace with a native egui GUI and an Inno Setup installer, and it's the most-starred project in the account.
## Why I built it
Capture protection is a per-window rendering flag, not real security — but it quietly breaks legitimate things like recording a tutorial, filing a bug report, or archiving your own session. I wanted to understand exactly how the protection is enforced at the window-manager level, and the cleanest way to understand a mechanism is to build the thing that flips it back.
## How it works
The tool injects a small payload into the target process and clears the window's display-affinity flag (WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE) so the compositor no longer excludes it from capture. The workspace splits cleanly along those lines:
- a shared injection library and a CLI,
- one-shot and persistent payload DLLs,
- a thin
eguifront end with a live process list, tray mode, watch-list, global hotkey, and update checker, - plus a 32-bit fallback for x86 targets and a stress tester.
Everything is Rust end to end, which keeps the injection path small, fast, and free of a heavyweight runtime.
## A note on intent
This is a tool for capturing windows you're entitled to capture — your own sessions, software you're testing, content you have the right to record. It isn't a DRM circumvention tool and shouldn't be used to capture protected content you don't own.