Windrecorder: Your Ultimate Open-Source Digital Memory for Windows
Windrecorder is a revolutionary open-source software that acts as a digital memory, capturing everything happening on your screen through screen recordings and making it searchable via OCR text recognition and image embedding. With Windrecorder, you can effortlessly retrace your steps, find that webpage you visited at a particular moment, or even recover lost or changed content from a Word document.
Similar to Rewind for Mac, Windrecorder fills the gap for Windows users, offering a privacy-focused solution by keeping all data processing and storage local, ensuring your information remains secure and confidential.
Here's how it works:
Windrecorder runs in the background, automatically recording 15-minute video segments of your screen activity. It then indexes these video snippets, pausing recording when the screen is idle, during screen transitions, or when your device is locked.
During idle periods, Windrecorder analyzes and maintains the recorded videos in the background, including compression, cleanup, OCR processing, and image embedding identification.
This concept is reminiscent of the surveillance suite offered by Synology's DSM, where video footage is analyzed, and any detected motion or events are marked, allowing users to quickly jump to those moments.
Windrecorder provides a similar functionality by recording and processing video segments, although there may be a slight analysis delay due to the 15-minute segment length.
Image Embedding Indexing as an Optional Extension:
This feature requires separate installation and enables hourly recordings with a storage footprint ranging from 2MB to 100MB, depending on screen activity and the number of displays. On average, it utilizes 10-20GB of space monthly, which can be further reduced through different video compression presets. The SQLite database occupies around 160MB per month.
Best Practices:
For optimal use, install and set up Windrecorder to launch automatically on system startup. This way, it quietly runs in the background, capturing your activities without any manual intervention.
When your screen is idle, locked, or your device goes to sleep, Windrecorder enters a maintenance state, ensuring that your recorded content is readily available whenever you need it.
Installation and Deployment:
Windrecorder relies on ffmpeg, Git, and Python for its functionality, so users will need to ensure these software environments are installed beforehand. Detailed instructions and requirements can be found on the project's GitHub page: https://github.com/yuka-friends/Windrecorder
Privacy Reminder:
While Windrecorder offers an incredibly useful digital memory solution, it's important to prioritize privacy. Ensure that your PC is secure and accessible only by you to prevent any potential privacy breaches.