Don’t you hate it when you’re looking for that video, song, or article you saw but can’t quite remember what it’s called or where you saw it?
Scrolling through your social media feeds only distracts you further. Eventually, you begin to wonder if you ever saw it at all. Did someone send it to you? Is it even real? Are you real?
Windrecorder bills itself as your “personal memory search engine”. It records everything you do on your PC and saves it locally as a video to rewind and search through later. If that sounds eerily similar to Black Mirror‘s The Entire History of You (season 1 episode 3), you’re not far off.
Windrecorder remembers
Instead of using “grain” technology to record your memories directly, Windrecorder captures and records your monitor’s video feed.
It uses FFmpeg, an open-source suite of libraries and programs, to record 15 minutes at a time. It then uses local Windows features like OCR (optical character recognition) and image embedding to index the video chunks, allowing you to search for keywords or images.
The program can generate various activity statistic reports for you, like word clouds, timelines, or scatter plots of everything you’ve done on your PC — excluding the specific apps or areas of your screen you tell it to ignore.
If the privacy-conscious are cringing at the very thought of this, it might help to know that everything is recorded, processed, and stored locally on your machine. Nothing is uploaded to the cloud.
That does mean you’ll need to keep an eye on your local memory and storage as FFmpeg can be a memory hog and video files tend to need lots of space. The other drawback is that only single-monitor recording is available at the moment — multi-monitor support is in development.
Still, what more could you ask for from a free and open-source app available on GitHub?
