VIZEN

Free, open-source overlays for Windows. Pick any window (a game, a video call, a live chat, a video, a web page), crop the part you need and keep it on top of your game, in a clean window for OBS, or in a composition. VIZEN also includes Smart Notes, Smart Draw, a Smart Audio Mixer and an optional browser extension that shows every Chrome, Edge or Brave tab on its own.

• Free and open source (GPL-3.0). No accounts, no ads, no tracking, no servers: everything runs on your PC.
• Game-safe by design. VIZEN never injects into games, never reads game memory and never bypasses anti-cheat or DRM. It only uses public Windows APIs (see Games and anti-cheat).
• English and Romanian interface, dark and light themes, five accent colours.

Website: www.vizen.ro · Contact: [email protected]

Contents

• Requirements
• Install
• Quick start: your first overlay
• Tour of the app
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Games and anti-cheat
• Privacy
• Known limitations
• Build from source
• Contact
• License

Requirements

• Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime for browser sources (already installed on Windows 11 and on most Windows 10 PCs).
• VIZEN Connector (optional): Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or Brave, version 116 or later.
• The Performance page in VIZEN measures your own PC and shows which level it reaches.

Install

1. Download VIZEN-Setup-x64.exe from the Releases page.
2. Run it and follow the steps. Windows asks for administrator permission once, because VIZEN is installed in Program Files. VIZEN itself then runs as a normal app.
3. Start VIZEN from the Start menu or the desktop shortcut.

Settings, notes and profiles are saved in your user folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\VIZEN). Uninstall from Settings → Apps → Installed apps.

Quick start: your first overlay

1. Open the window you want to see over your game (for example a video call, a live chat or a video).
2. In VIZEN, open Sources. Every open window is listed and sorted into Browsers, Calls, Media, Cameras and Other.
3. Select the window. A live preview appears on the right.
4. Press Create overlay. A copy of the window appears on top of everything.
5. Move it by dragging, resize it from its edges, and double-click it to remove black bars.
6. Want only part of the window? Press Regions…, draw a rectangle (or several) over the preview and open each region as its own overlay.
7. Start your game in windowed or borderless (fullscreen windowed) mode. The overlay stays on top.
8. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to make the overlays click-through (your clicks go to the game), and Ctrl+Shift+F10 to hide or show them all.

Tour of the app

Sources

All open windows, refreshed every 3 seconds and grouped by type. Search by title, app or window class. Select a window to see it live, then turn it into an overlay, an OBS output, or open the region editor to crop it. With the browser extension, every browser tab also appears here on its own (see Browser tabs).

Gaming mode

Your open overlays, each with opacity, click-through, visibility and an optional performance readout (measured frames per second, dropped frames and latency). You can also set the volume of the app behind an overlay and listen to it on another audio device.

Calls mode

Video calls from Discord, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp, Skype and browser calls (Google Meet, Messenger and others) are detected automatically. Mirror the whole call as one overlay, or use Crop participants to draw one region per person and give each one its own overlay or OBS window. VIZEN does not detect participants automatically; you choose the regions.

Studio / OBS mode

Clean output windows made for OBS Window Capture: a whole window or a cropped region, with an exact pixel size, fit mode and a chroma-key background. Compositions combine several captures, logos, GIFs and videos into one window, so OBS needs only one source.

How to use it in OBS:

1. In VIZEN, create an OBS output from a source (or a region).
2. In OBS, add Window Capture and pick [VIZEN.App.exe]: VIZEN Output · ….
3. Set the capture method to Windows 10 (1903 and up).

Browser sources

Open any web page in its own VIZEN window (a YouTube or Twitch chat, an alerts page, a dashboard). It appears in Sources as "VIZEN Browser", so you can crop it, make it an overlay or an OBS output. The built-in browser is Microsoft Edge WebView2 with its own profile.

Browser tabs

Windows can only capture windows, not tabs. The optional VIZEN Connector extension lets VIZEN see every tab on its own. Get it from Microsoft Edge Add-ons (Chrome Web Store: in review; Chrome and Brave can also load it from the browser-extension folder):

• every tab appears under Sources with its title, site and category;
• Switch to tab, Mute / Unmute and Separate window (moves the tab into its own window, only when you ask);
• tabs that play sound appear in the Smart Audio Mixer under their browser, with a mute button (browsers have no volume per tab, so VIZEN offers mute only);
• Mirror this tab live (in the extension's menu) opens a small window that shows one tab live, even when the tab is in the background, ready to be captured. Chrome asks for your permission once for each mirror.

Set it up once:

1. In VIZEN, open Browser and press Connect.
2. Microsoft Edge: install VIZEN Connector from Edge Add-ons. Chrome / Brave (until the Chrome Web Store listing is live): open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, press Load unpacked and choose the folder shown in VIZEN (browser-extension in the VIZEN folder).

The extension sends only tab titles and site names (never full addresses or page content) to VIZEN on your PC. Incognito tabs are never shared. Disconnect removes everything VIZEN registered.

Media & graphics and Schedules

Import sponsor logos (PNG with transparency, JPG, WebP, BMP, TIFF), animated GIFs and short videos (MP4, MOV, WMV, AVI) and show them as layers over your game or in an OBS window. Schedules show them automatically, for example a logo for 10 seconds every 5 minutes, or a sponsor playlist.

Smart Notes

Text notes and checklists that float on your desktop and over borderless games. Each note can stay on top, be see-through, lock its position and be click-through. Ctrl+Shift+F11 shows or hides all notes, Ctrl+Shift+F8 turns edit mode on or off. Notes are saved automatically.

Smart Draw

Draw arrows, rectangles, ellipses, freehand lines and text directly over your screen, apps and borderless games.

• Ctrl+Shift+F7 turns Smart Draw on or off.
• Ctrl+Shift+F6 switches between drawing and pass-through (your drawings stay, clicks go to the window underneath).
• Ctrl+Shift+F5 shows or hides the drawings, Ctrl+Shift+F4 clears them.
• Undo / redo with Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, a precision or whole-object eraser, and save / restore a drawing.

Smart Audio Mixer

The volume of every app that plays sound, separately, plus the Windows volume (kept in sync with Windows). Save mixes as profiles (Gaming, Streaming, Meeting, Studio or your own) and control everything from a small floating mixer on top of your game (Ctrl+Shift+F3), with adjustable transparency and size.

Smart Audio Focus lowers the apps you choose (music, game) while your priority app (for example Discord) is heard, then brings them back smoothly. It reacts to how loud the sound is, not to words. Your own volumes are kept and restored.

Profiles

Save the overlays you have open (sources, positions, sizes, settings) under a name, for example one per game, and reopen them all in one click. VIZEN finds each source again by app and window title and tells you which ones are not running.

Performance

Measured, not guessed: frames per second from the source and on screen, dropped frames, latency and frame pacing for every capture, plus the processor, graphics card and memory VIZEN uses. Auto Performance watches every capture and tells you the likely cause when frames drop. A test-pattern window lets you measure capture quality on your own PC.

Settings

Language, theme and accent colour, source refresh, keyboard shortcuts (all can be changed), launch at sign-in and more. Changes apply immediately.

Keyboard shortcuts

All shortcuts work while a game is in front and can be changed in Settings → Hotkeys.

Games and anti-cheat

VIZEN's overlays are ordinary always-on-top windows, like the ones Discord, Steam or NVIDIA show. VIZEN:

• never injects code into a game, never reads or writes game memory and never automates input;
• never bypasses anti-cheat or DRM protection;
• captures windows with Windows Graphics Capture, the same public API used by the Windows Snipping Tool and OBS.

No one can guarantee how every anti-cheat system decides, because their rules are not public. Details, and the list of Windows APIs VIZEN uses, are in docs/GAME_SAFETY.md.

Privacy

• No account, no telemetry, no network connections of its own (web pages you open in a browser source load as usual).
• Settings, notes, profiles and the media library list stay in %LOCALAPPDATA%\VIZEN on your PC.
• The browser extension talks only to VIZEN on the same PC and shares only tab titles and site names.

Known limitations

• Exclusive fullscreen games draw directly to the screen, so no window can appear over them without injecting into the game, which VIZEN never does. Switch the game to Borderless or Fullscreen windowed; VIZEN shows a hint when it detects exclusive fullscreen.
• Minimized windows are not drawn by Windows, so their overlays pause until the window is restored. Windows covered by other windows keep working.
• Chrome and Edge windows stop drawing while they are completely covered by other windows (a browser optimisation). Use the extension's Mirror this tab live, which stays live even when covered.
• Browser tabs can be muted from VIZEN, but browsers have no volume control per tab.

Build from source

Requirements: Windows 10/11, the .NET 10 SDK.

git clone <this repository>
cd VIZEN
dotnet build VIZEN.App/VIZEN.App.csproj -c Release
dotnet test VIZEN.Tests/VIZEN.Tests.csproj

The app is then in VIZEN.App/bin/Release/net10.0-windows10.0.22621.0/VIZEN.App.exe.

To build the installer, install Inno Setup 6 and run:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\build-installer.ps1

The installer is written to artifacts/installer/VIZEN-Setup-x64.exe.

Project layout:

Contact

• Website: www.vizen.ro
• Questions, partnerships and press: [email protected]
• Bugs and feature requests: GitHub Issues

License

Copyright (C) 2026 kalinvisuals.

VIZEN is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3 of the License (GPL-3.0-only). It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See LICENSE for the full text.

In short: anyone may use, study, change and share VIZEN, but whoever distributes it, or a program built from its code, must do so under the same license and publish the complete source code.

The name "VIZEN" and the VIZEN logo are not covered by this license: a modified version must not be distributed under the VIZEN name or with the VIZEN logo.

Third-party components keep their own licenses: NAudio (MIT), Microsoft WebView2 SDK (BSD-3-Clause), System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter (MIT); tests use xUnit (Apache-2.0).