Developer builds app that records, rewinds everything you do on PC

Inspired from an episode of Black Mirror, the sci-fi show, in which the grain technology allows people to record and replay their memories on demand, a new open-source app called Windrecorder is in development.

Dubbed as the "personal memory search engine," it captures everything happening on your screen, allowing you to rewind and search through it later, reported Tech Radar.

Windrecorder records screen activity in 15-minute chunks using FFmpeg. It then indexes these recordings using a Windows local OCR, or Optical Character recognition, API and image embedding technology. One has the option to ignore specific apps or screen areas, and it records only one screen at a time.

The app offers features like daily and periodic screen time summaries and circadian summaries, and it can generate monthly lightboxes.

As per the description available on GitHub, "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."

However, there are a couple of drawbacks. FFmpeg may occasionally consume a lot of memory, and instant rewind isn't possible—you have to wait for each 15-minute segment to finish recording before rewinding.

Additionally, the recordings aren't encrypted, but all data is handled locally, so nothing is uploaded to the cloud.

One thing to note is that there's currently no AI or LLM (Language Model) support, but it might be added in the future.a developer to create a new open-source app.

According to a cyber security expert’s Linkedin post, the tool, "Supports multiple languages. Currently built-in: Simplified Chinese, English, and Japanese. Welcome to contribute multilingual translations and help us improve copywriting quality."

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