Windrecorder is a personal memory search engine for Windows that records screen activity, allowing users to rewind, search via OCR or image description, and view activity statistics. It targets users seeking a local, privacy-focused alternative to recall tools, offering comprehensive data ownership and offline functionality.

How It Works

Windrecorder offers two recording modes: "Automatic Flexible Screenshots" captures screenshots periodically, indexing changes for real-time rewind and converting to video later, optimizing for low resource usage. "Direct Video Recording via FFmpeg" records continuous video segments, indexing after completion, providing smoother footage but with a potential query delay. Both modes pause on static screens or system idle states, performing automatic database maintenance and video compression.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Install: Download FFmpeg, install Git and Python (3.11 recommended, 3.12 not supported). Clone the repository and run install_update.bat.
• Prerequisites: FFmpeg (added to PATH), Git, Python 3.11.
• Usage: Run start_app.bat. Web UI accessible via system tray.
• Docs: https://github.com/yuka-friends/Windrecorder

Highlighted Details

• Supports multiple OCR engines (Rapid OCR, WeChat OCR, Tesseract OCR) for enhanced text recognition.
• Offers AI-powered tag summarization using LLMs.
• Provides various data summaries including activity statistics, word clouds, and timelines.
• Records multiple or single screens, or just the active window, with efficient indexing of changed scenes.

Maintenance & Community

The project is in early development, with active development encouraged via issues, discussions, and PRs. Links to community discussions and roadmaps are available in the project's GitHub Discussions section.

Licensing & Compatibility

The project is licensed under the MIT License, permitting commercial use and closed-source linking.

Limitations & Caveats

The project is in early development and may have minor issues. Some UI elements might flicker during video recording, and specific database access errors can occur during indexing, requiring manual database file cleanup.