Tools
Klip-Stitcher
A desktop app that stitches a folder of sequentially-named recording clips back into one continuous file — built after OBS quietly split a three-hour stream into hundreds of thirty-second fragments.
I streamed for about three hours on Twitch with the plan of handing the recording to an editor to cut down for YouTube. When I went looking for the file, there wasn’t one — I’d misconfigured OBS, and instead of a single recording I had several hundred clips of roughly thirty seconds each. Nobody was going to accept that for editing without serious costs.
The saving grace was that the split points were clean: no dead air, no dropped frames at the boundaries, so the pieces would join back together seamlessly if someone had the patience to line them all up. I did not have that patience several hundred times over, so I wrote something that did.
Choosing the wrong tool on purpose
I’m a web developer, not really a desktop developer despite my game development work. Rather than spend the project learning a native toolkit, I looked for ways to build something with the technologies I knew, and I was eventually pointed at Electron. It was my first time using it, and picking a familiar surface for an unfamiliar problem is a large part of why the thing got finished at all. I had a small learning curve with React and Electron, but most of the work was ultimately about figuring out how the required libraries for the file handling worked.
What it actually does
It reads a folder, identifies video files by extension, and — when the files follow a sequential naming scheme — orders them and excludes anything that doesn’t match the pattern. It reads each clip’s metadata and shows a compatibility matrix across the set, so you can see up front whether the clips can be stream-copied straight through, whether they’re safe to remux to MP4, or whether the mismatch means a re-encode. Stitching runs in whichever of those modes fits, and it can export the result split at marker times or chapter from VOD markers.
What it deliberately doesn’t do
There’s no AI anywhere in it, and it isn’t an editor. It won’t rescue a set of clips that were never contiguous, and it will not trim fade-in or fade-out frames at the ends of clips — if your recording has them, they stay in. The sequence detection is a convenience: a human still has to look at the list and confirm the right files are in the right order before anything gets written.
Where it stands
Built with Electron, React and TypeScript over bundled FFmpeg binaries, packaged with Electron Forge and Vite. v0.1.0 is tagged and released, and that’s the last version I worked on, because it did the job I built it for. It solved a real problem exactly once and I will hopefully never need it again, which is the honest lifespan of a lot of good tooling.