Your screen’s time machine that never phones home

What it does

Windrecorder sits in your Windows system tray and continuously captures your screen as either periodic screenshots or direct FFmpeg video segments. It indexes changed scenes into a local SQLite database, letting you rewind playback and search your visual history via OCR text, image semantics, page titles, and browser URLs through a web interface. The entire pipeline runs offline: no network connection is required and no data leaves your machine.

The interesting bit

Instead of blindly hoarding footage, the tool only indexes scenes that actually change and automatically pauses when the screen is idle, locked, or matches a skip list you define by window title or process name. The README even documents a hex-editing fix for an FFmpeg mouse-flicker bug, which tells you exactly how deep the project is willing to go to stay self-contained.

Key highlights

• Two capture modes: lightweight 3-second screenshots that batch into video every 15 minutes, or continuous FFmpeg recording in 15-minute chunks.
• Query interface supports OCR text search, image-semantic search via an optional extension, and activity visualizations like timelines, word clouds, and scatter plots.
• Pluggable OCR backends including Windows.Media.Ocr, WeChat OCR, RapidOCR, and Tesseract.
• Idle maintenance automatically compresses video and cleans the database when you step away.
• Monthly storage footprint is roughly 10–20 GB of video (compressible) and about 160 MB of SQLite metadata, depending on screen time.

Caveats

• The project labels itself as early-stage, and the README openly warns that you may hit minor glitches in daily use.
• First-time web UI launches can throw FileNotFoundError while background indexing is still catching up, and recent data may simply not appear until indexing finishes.
• Python 3.12 is explicitly unsupported; you must stick to Python 3.11.

Verdict

Worth a look if you want Rewind-style memory search on Windows but refuse to let your screen history touch the internet. Skip it if you need a polished, zero-friction experience or if your disk space is already tight.