Spins indefinitely after recording is stopped or when trying to open recording

[StarAzure]

Description

Recordings cannot be opened. I have lost multiple long recordings of YouTube tutorials. I am a paid Lifetime subscriber. The software is so unreliable and wastes a lot of time loosing recordings.

Reproduction

Just a simple recording - main screen, camera and mic. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. 50% of times after recording is done it spins forever. Also tried to open the recording from "recordings" - no error but spins indefinitely

Additional Context

• Cap version: latest
• Operating system, version: Windows 11
• Device (optional): Thinkpad - 32GB RAM

[linear]

CAP-702

[tembo]

This looks related to several Windows-specific recording stability issues that have been reported:

• #1466 - Cap desktop hangs when stopping recording (Windows 11, v0.3.83) - exact same symptom of indefinite spinning after stop
• #512 - App won't reopen after recording session (Windows) - similar stuck state requiring Task Manager

The recent #1717 HLS recording fixes (merged April 7) specifically addressed stop-recording freezing on Display captures by adding layered timeouts across the pipeline. If you're on a version prior to this fix, upgrading to the latest release may help.

For logs: On Windows, logs should be at C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Roaming\so.cap.desktop\logs. If the logs folder is missing, that itself is useful diagnostic information (mentioned in #1466 as well). Some recordings may also have per-recording logs inside the .cap package - right-click a problematic recording's folder and look for .log files.

Workaround for recovering recordings: As noted in #1341, you can often manually recover recordings:

1. Go to Previous Recordings and click the folder icon
2. Right-click the .cap file and select "Show Package Contents" (or just open it as a folder on Windows)
3. Navigate to Content > Segments > segment-0
4. Use ffmpeg to combine the files: ffmpeg -i display.mp4 -i audio-input.ogg -c:v copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 -c:a aac -b:a 192k output.mp4

For maintainers: The stop recording path is in apps/desktop/src-tauri/src/recording.rs with the core pipeline timeouts in crates/recording/src/output_pipeline/core.rs. The intermittent 50% failure rate suggests a race condition or resource contention issue rather than a deterministic bug. Logs would help identify whether it's stopping at the video source level (5s timeout), drain loop (2s deadline), or overall pipeline (10s timeout).