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Windrecorder

🦝 Windrecorder | Personal Memory Search Engine

An Open Source Mac App Rewind / Copilot Recall alternative tool on Windows to help you retrieve memory cues.

English | 简体中文

Windrecorder is a memory search app by records everything on your screen in small size, to let you rewind what you have seen, query through OCR text or image description, and get activity statistics. All its capabilities run completely locally, without the need for an Internet connection or uploading any data, you should own all your data.

Windrecorder

Windrecorder currently does:

  • Record multiple or single screens, or just the active window, with smaller file sizes and lower system resources, ensuring stable, continuous capture and the ability to rewind live footage;
  • Only index the changed scenes and update the OCR text, page title, browser url and other information to the database; Custom skip conditions (by window title, process name, included text, or screen still time); Automatically maintain the database, clean and compress the video when no one is using the computer;
  • Complete webui interface, which can review the screen, conduct OCR/image semantics and other queries;
  • Provide data summaries such as activity statistics, word clouds, timelines, light boxes, scatter plots, etc.; Supports tags summarization using AI (LLM).
  • Supports multiple languages. Currently built-in: Simplified Chinese, English, and Japanese. Welcome to contribute multilingual translations and help us improve copywriting quality;
  • In addition to Windows' built-in recognition capabilities, it also supports other third-party OCR engines (performance test reference), currently including:
  • coming soon... pay attention to our PR :)

Warning

This project is still in the early stages of development, and you may encounter some minor problems in experience and use, feel free to submit issue feedback, follow updates, and initiate discussions or roadmap in Discussions. You are also welcome to help us optimize and build the project, submit PR / code review.

🦝 Installation

  • Download ffmpeg (the download file name is: ffmpeg-master-latest-win64-gpl-shared.zip), extract all files in bin directory(excluding the bin directory itself) to C:\Windows\System32 (or other directories located in PATH)

  • Install Git, just keep clicking next step.

  • Install Python, make sure to check Add python.exe to PATH when installing.

    • Currently, Python 3.12 is not supported. It is recommended to use python 3.11, which is the version pointed to by the link above.

  • In file explorer, navigate to the directory where you want to install Windrecorder (it is recommended to place it in a partition with sufficient space), and download the app through the terminal command git clone https://github.com/yuka-friends/Windrecorder

    • You can open the folder you want to install, enter cmd in the path bar and press Enter, and you will be located into current directory in terminal, then paste the above command and press Enter to execute;

  • Open install_update.bat in the directory to install dependencies and configure the app. If everything goes well, you can start using it!

🦝 How to use

  • Open start_app.bat in the directory, the tool will run on the system tray and be used through the right-click menu;
  • All data (video, database, statistical information) will be stored in userdata directory under Windrecorder. If you want to copy or move the app location (for example, if you change the computer), you can delete .venv in the directory and moved, then re-run install_update.bat to install the virtual environment to use it;

Tip

Best practice: Set Run on system startup in webui to record everything without any fuss.

Recording will be automatically paused when there is no change in the picture or the screen is sleeping. When the computer is idle and no one is using it, the tool will automatically maintain the database, compress, and clean up expired videos.

Just set it and forget it!

Note

If the command line window flashes after opening start_app.bat and Windrecorder still does not appear in the system tray after a while, please create a file named hide_CLI_by_python.txt in the directory and open start_app.bat and try again; #232

🦝 How it works

Windrecorder

Windrecorder offers two recording modes for your convenience:

  1. Automatic Flexible Screenshots:

    Upon starting the recording, Windrecorder takes screenshots every 3 seconds (by default), indexing them when content or text changes, allowing real-time rewind. Additionally, every 15 minutes, past screenshots are automatically converted into videos.

    This option consumes low system resources and is suitable for users who need to store, rewind, and search for memory cues.

  2. Direct Video Recording via FFmpeg:

    When recording begins, Windrecorder records video in 15-minute segments, indexing the video clips after recording completion (hence, there may be a 15-minute delay in data querying).

    This option consumes moderate system resources and enables smooth and complete recording of computer activities.

When the screen remains static, window titles or screen content are on the exclusion list, or the computer enters lock screen, recording pauses automatically and performs idle maintenance (compressing and cleaning videos, conducting image recognition embedding, etc.) until the user returns to continue operating the computer.

  • Image Embedding is provided as an extension and can be installed under the directory extension/install_img_embedding_module.
Video recording size SQlite database size
Per Hour: 2-100 Mb (depends on screen change\number of monitors)
Per Month: 10-20 Gb (depends on screen time) Different video compression presets can compress these data to 0.1-0.7 times the size Per Month: About 160 Mb

🦝 Q&A | Frequently Asked Questions

Q: The mouse pointer flicker during recording (Direct Video Recording via FFmpeg)

  • A: It's a Windows historical issues, you can try this post method to solve. TL;DR:
    • Use any hex editor (such as HxD) to open avdevice-XX.dll in the previously downloaded FFmpeg/bin;
    • Search for hex code 20 00 cc 40 and change the last two digits of 40 to 00;
    • Save the file;

Q: There is no data in the recent period when opening webui.

  • A: When the tool is indexing data, webui will not create the latest temporary database file. Solution: Try to wait for a while, wait for the tool indexing to complete, refresh the webui interface, or delete the database file with the suffix _TEMP_READ.db in the db directory and refresh it (if there is a database file damage prompt, don’t worry, it may be The tool is still in the index, please try refreshing/removing it after some time). This strategy will be fixed and refactored in the future. #26

Q: When opening webui, it prompts: FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified: './db\\user_2023-10_wind.db-journal'

  • A: Usually occurs when accessing the webui for the first time, while the tool is still indexing data. Solution: After the tool background indexing is completed, delete the corresponding database file with the suffix _TEMP_READ.db in the db folder and refresh it.

Q: Windows.Media.Ocr.Cli OCR is not available/the recognition rate is too low

  • A1: Check whether the language pack/input method of the target language has been added to the system: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr

  • A2: Install a third-party OCR engine in the extension directory. They usually have higher recognition accuracy and support simultaneous recognition of multiple languages, but may take up slightly more performance;

🧡

Thanks to the following projects

🧡 Like this tool? Also check out YUKA NAGASE's gentle music on Youtube and streaming music platforms, thank ya!

"Your tools suck, check out my girl Yuka Nagase, she's amazing, I code 10 times faster when listening to her." -- @jpswing

Vote Windrecorder on Product Hunt:

Windrecorder - search & rewind everything happened on your screen | Product Hunt

🧠 In addition to Windrecorder, what other tools provide similar functions?

Feel free to supplement, and hope you find the tool that suits you:

For more research and discussion on HackerNews: