Tf2DemoSalvage

An independent, clean-room tool for TF2 demo files. It ships no Valve-authored game assets — the viewer reads maps, models, materials and sounds from your own TF2 install, and the zip contains none of them. Not affiliated with Valve.

What it is

TF2 demos carry the entity schema they were recorded against, so a demo is readable without the game that made it. The current client validates that schema against its own and refuses old demos; this reads what the file provides and doesn’t. The download holds two programs:

• tf2demosalvage — a command-line tool. It decompiles a demo to readable text, to JSON Lines, or to an assembly form that compiles back to a byte-identical demo.
• tf2demoview — a 3D viewer. It plays a demo back with the game’s own maps, models, materials and sounds, and takes key bindings from your own TF2 config.

Beta, and what that means here

Decoding is well tested. The viewer is usable and is still visibly different from the game in places. The release notes list those places, and the repository tracks each one by number.

The ones you are most likely to hit: demos recorded for hours on an idle server (the 1.3 GB and 2 GB ones found so far) work in the command-line tool but are too large for the viewer’s timeline. A typical modern match holds about 4 GB in the viewer. There are no footsteps or landing sounds, because the game predicts those on the client and never records them in the demo.

What has been measured

• Five network protocols — 11, 14, 15, 16 and 24 — covering demos recorded on clients from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013, plus a 2020 match. Each decodes and round-trips in every test run. Protocols 17 to 23 have no known surviving demo, so they are untested.
• A census of 459 distinct real-world demos on 2026-09-30: the entity stage failed on none. At that point 214 passed every stage. Every failure class the census found has been fixed since, but the census has not been re-run, so the post-fix pass count is not yet known.
• Text round-trips to the identical file, held by the test suite for every era above.
• Voice from every era: Speex, Steam Voice, CELT and Opus.

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11 (x64) with a Direct3D 11 GPU, and 8 GB of RAM at minimum — 16 GB recommended. Each program carries its own copy of .NET, so there is nothing else to install. The viewer needs your own TF2 install; without one it plays the demo without the game’s maps and models. The command-line tool needs only the demo.

The emblem on this page is a Team Fortress 2 style logo by PD Balthazar, released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. It is fan-made and not an official Valve asset. This project remains unaffiliated with Valve.