About valab

valab is a Valorant replay analyzer that reads the .vrf replay file the game writes to your PC. It does not watch video and it does not read a stats API, which is why it can tell you where ten players were standing at any moment of any round.

Nothing is guessed from video

Most tools that claim to analyze gameplay are looking at pixels. They record your screen, or they read a minimap out of a video frame, and then they estimate what happened from what a camera could see. That approach inherits every limit of the camera: it only knows what was on screen, it cannot see the other team, and every number it produces is an inference from an image.

A .vrf replay is not video. It is the recorded network stream of the match, the same data the game client itself used to draw the game. It carries positions, view angles, health, shields, credits, weapons, ability charges, damage and the exact moments things happened. When valab tells you a player was holding an angle from a particular spot at a particular second, it is not estimating that. The file says so.

That is also why valab can scout an opponent. The replay holds all ten players, not just the one whose screen was recorded, so the same file that shows your round shows what the other team was doing during it.

How the format is actually read

Valorant does not publish the replay format, so it was recovered by measurement. The container turns out to be Unreal Engine's replay format with a Riot-specific marker at the front, and everything inside it was worked out field by field against real matches.

The method matters, so it is worth being specific about it. A layout is only accepted when it agrees with something the file states somewhere else. When the endpoints of a trapwire were being worked out, every possible position in the data was tried and scored against where the game itself said the wire had been placed. One position agreed 62 times out of 62, and nothing else agreed twice. That is the standard: a reading is confirmed by agreeing with independent evidence, not by looking plausible.

Each replay also records which build of the game produced it. valab checks that against the builds it has been verified against, so a patch that moves things does not quietly produce wrong numbers. A match from an unrecognised build is flagged rather than trusted.

What it still cannot see

Some things are simply not in the file, and pretending otherwise would undermine everything else on this site.

Nearsight is the clearest example. Flashes and concusses are recorded per player, with the duration the game stated and the moment the effect cleared. Nearsight is not on the same channel: 118 nearsight casts across the test matches produced no readings at all, so Reyna's Leer, Omen's Paranoia and Skye's Seekers are not tracked yet. Gekko's Dizzy is a blind by Riot's own description and does not appear there either, which means a lobby with a Gekko in it will under-report blinds until that channel is found.

Player positions are sampled rather than continuous, so anything derived from movement has a floor on how precisely it can be known. Where a number is an estimate, the site says so and states the precision rather than printing decimal places it cannot support.

These gaps get written down and worked on rather than papered over. Three features were once declared impossible on this project and all three turned out to be in the file; the lesson taken from that was to treat every absence as a gap in the looking until proven otherwise.

Privacy

The matches you upload are private to your account. Real player identities are resolved on the server and never sent to a browser, so a match page renders by agent rather than by name for anyone who is not signed in. The one deliberate exception is the demo match, which is public so that a stranger can judge the tool without making an account.

The .vrf inspector goes further: it reads the file entirely inside your browser and uploads nothing at all. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

Who builds it

valab is a small independent project, not a Riot product and not endorsed by Riot Games. What ships is listed in the changelog, dated, with the limitations of each piece of work stated alongside it.

Questions, bug reports and things that read wrong are all welcome at contact@valab.gg.