In simple English
This tool runs on your Windows computer and records your screen in the background. It reads the text on your screen using optical character recognition, which means you can search for past words or images later. It works like the built-in recall feature on some newer computers, but you control all your data. Everything stays on your hard drive, and nothing goes to the internet. It is free to use and open source, though it requires some space on your hard drive for video files.
What it is
Windrecorder is a local screen recording and visual search application for Windows written in Python. It captures your desktop activity, extracts text from images, and provides a web interface to search through your history.
What it is good for
Solo builders who want to find something they saw on their screen last week, without relying on closed cloud services or commercial operating system features.
- Keeps all recorded videos and databases entirely on your local machine.
- Supports multiple third-party optical character recognition engines for better text reading.
- Automatically compresses old recordings and pauses when your screen is static.
- Requires manual installation of FFmpeg, Git, and Python package managers.
- Stores large amounts of video data over time, consuming hard drive space.
- Only runs on Windows operating systems.
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FFmpeg for video encoding and Streamlit for the user interface
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git clone https://github.com/yuka-friends/Windrecorder cd Windrecorder install_update.bat