Seed Capture

Why this exists. The queue must never be empty — a newcomer with zero mortar who opens an empty queue is standing at a locked door. The fallback is armed; it has no content. These are that content.

The blur happens before the recorder, not after. The camera frame is drawn to a canvas, blurred and pixel-quantised there, and the recorder is attached to the blurred canvas — not to the camera. A sharp frame is never encoded, never buffered, never written. Not "we delete it": it is never made. That is the same sentence we tell every user, and here it is structurally true.

A seed clip is labelled a seed clip. We do not slip staged clips into the queue dressed as strangers. The first thing witnessing teaches must not be that the queue can contain things that aren't what they appear to be.

It saves the same artefact a real submission makes. Cody2's capture engine ships the reviewer a 1fps blurred frame strip, not a video — so this saves that strip too. A seed clip that looked like a smooth 10s video would teach a newcomer to read something the queue will never actually show them, and they'd meet their first real submission unprepared.