playthru

A tiny viewer for ultrawide monitors and cheap capture cards.

F11 for fullscreen. Right click for options.

windows / v0.015-alpha
About

Playthru is for the slightly annoying case where a cheap capture card gives you a 16:9 feed and your monitor is much wider.

It fills the unused sides with a blurred version of the same frame, while keeping the real feed sharp in the middle. There is no dashboard to learn and no launcher sitting between you and the picture.

Playthru application preview showing blurred ultrawide edges
The problem

16:9 video on an ultrawide screen

Black pillars take up a surprising amount of an ultrawide display. OBS works, but using a full recording application just to watch a capture feed is overkill. Many bundled capture-card viewers are worse.

The fix

Use the picture itself as the background

The captured frame is blurred and stretched behind the sharp feed. The background follows the game in real time, so the unused space becomes part of the picture instead of a pair of black bars. Settings live behind a right-click menu.

Tech details
  • AudioNAudio for input passthrough (~50ms latency). Output switching uses the Windows IPolicyConfig COM interface.
  • VideoHandles capture-card quirks natively, including a fallback that copies D3D surfaces when necessary.
  • SettingsSaved automatically to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Playthru\settings.json.
Files
PlaythruSetup-0.015-alpha.exe Windows installer - this is an alpha test build with fullscreen support
Download
source_code_alpha.zip Complete VS Code project - open source (alpha)
Source
OLDER VERSIONS
PlaythruSetup-0.014.exe Windows installer
Download
source_code.zip Complete VS Code project - open source
Source