For those wondering about the difference between this and OBS, it looks like this is actually for creating time lapses of the desktop and camera specifically:
> A open-source menu bar application for creating screen and camera timelapses without excessive file sizes.
- When you record a gaming session (Geforce Now), it crashes the system, causing a reboot. I realize it may not have been meant for it, but it shouldn't be crashing the entire system.
But it would certainly be cool to have a simpler alternative to OBS for recording programming sessions. Does anyone know of a suitable tool?
Every single major OS ships with a simple screen recorder. Name your OS and I'll tell you the name of the screen recorder you already have installed right now.
OBS is great when I want to record precisely, but needs a lot of setting up.
I wish there'd be something as easy to use as print screen but for record too. Press button, mark rectangle/select window, press start, record for 5 sec, export as gif/mp4, directly upload to Imgur and save link in clipboard. Would pay money for this.
Many moons ago, I hacked together a similar app with Python [1]. It broke because of some MacOS changes and ever since then I hoped that someone would build a "native" alternative with Swift. Good job! Now I can finally point people there and archive my repo.
Nice, I’ll try it. I assume this takes a screenshot every second or so and we get a video?
Semi-related but I’ve been wanting a screen recording tool that drops identical consecutive frames for reducing file size. Maybe frame comparison would be mouse-insensitive idk. Cause I would like to review what I’ve been working on and still capture the details as I’m scrolling a page, but often there’s half a second where I’m just reading or I take a drink of water or something and I don’t need those frames. I suppose this is a pretty close approximation if I can capture like 10fps or something
The most obvious use is of course to reencode the video after you did your screen recording with your usual software, but it might be possible to combine with ffmpeg's screen capture and do it all in one go, I haven't tried it.
This looks interesting to me. I want to see if there's any pattern when I work with my laptop.
1. Tried installing with brew; failed. Using binary from the releases page (last released Dec 26, 2023) works.
2. Enabled the option to record 2 displays (Macbook Air's screen + 1 external display) and Facetime camera. It works! I'm using MBA M2 and it took ~20% of cpu. No lag.
3. I disabled the FT camera and only record 2 displays, cpu usage down to ~6%. If I only record 1 screen (2560x1440), cpu usage is down to ~2%.
4. Timelapze is running while I type this. I have other apps running (vscode, spark, tableplus, etc.). I don't think I notice any performance degradation, which is good.
5. Output of the recording is good. I can still optimize the size with ffmpeg. A recording of 1 minute 55 seconds (6x speed up) has 141 mb size. It becomes 28.3 mb after optimizing with ffmpeg (with no noticeable quality drop)
Will test this more and use it as daily screen recording. I want to see what's the longest duration I can record with this. Here's an example of the recording output. I trimmed to 15s (6x speed up, so it's 90 seconds in reality):
Homebrew wants to avoid being filled up with random stuff that nobody uses.
So to get something into homebrew repos you have to show somehow that people use it.
I guess GitHub star count is one way of doing that. Even though it’s probably pretty easy to game it.
For open source software that is cross platform you could probably get it into another package manager first, and then use that to argue for getting into Homebrew. But since this tool is macOS specific it would not get added to any Linux or BSD package manager repos.
This will be great for code/game jams. You can let it run for the duration because it's not a resource hog and wind up with a cool time-lapse video at the end that's a manageable file size for some quick editing and you're done. There's nothing more daunting than completing a marathon programming session only to be faced with a bunch of video editing and publishing. I'm always intrigued when I watch one and it's a cool way to get more people to try your game after; thanks for this!
It looks like this software is actually for recording time lapses, specifically:
> Take color-accurate timelapses of your screens and cameras on MacOS
But speaking of OBS, I use it on my Mac (a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra and 64gb memory) and it does not feel good. The interface feels slow and laggy, and after Sonoma introduced native noise canceling for all microphones, the audio recording of my mic sounds deeply pitch shifted and slowed to the point that I sound like a hostage taker making a phone call to the police in some old 80s movie. I can't find a way to fix that despite fiddling for hours.
OP, it looks like you’re shadowbanned for some reason. I can see your comments but only with showdead turned on. I’d try emailing dang to see if you can get unbanned, I don’t see any reason you should be in your comment history to be honest.
I think it's more that his comment did not contribute to the conversation in any way, as per HN guidelines. The idea is to keep the threads as clean of superfluous answers as possible.
I agree it is noisy and apologize for being too concise (I hoped it was clear it frustates) but find it concerning there is no agreement it should have been there. No rules for that? old articles need to he dated. videos needs to be tagged.
I added the comment as it is a clear omission and did not get revised by moderators. open source feels like to draw people in, but then you find out it is platform specific/mac-only. If this was there, it would have saved me and others time by ignoring it.
> Weird you're getting downvoted to agreeing with something that definitely should be there.
"Me too" responses are generally discouraged, unless they add extra detail/nuance or other related information to the thread. If all you are doing is agreeing, that is what the upvote button is for.
In some places a "me too" or "this!" response has extra effect, in places like Facebook a comment is now likely to spread attention around your contacts for instance, but not here.
Time-lapse functionality, but only mentioned once in the title and no image shows options for time-lapse recordings? Always amusing when, as a user, you have to explore the unique selling point yourself through installation.
Right, it's in the about in the right hand column. I'd copy it to the top of the readme so it's somewhere noticable. Tbh I had never noticed the "about" box for github repos.
> A open-source menu bar application for creating screen and camera timelapses without excessive file sizes.
It should probably be in the title.