[HN Gopher] Show HN: Open Rewind - POC for audio and screen and ...
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       Show HN: Open Rewind - POC for audio and screen and video streaming
       to S3
        
       Got into a rabbit hole today.  POC works using 'npx efficient-
       recorder'.  Is this useful to anyone?
        
       Author : wwoessi
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2025-01-04 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | wild_egg wrote:
       | A FOSS alternative to Rewind that works on both MacOS and Linux
       | would be a dream come true tbh. Thanks for working on this, I'll
       | be trying it out sometime next week
        
         | wwoessi wrote:
         | It's not quite there yet, this is just a POC and there's lots
         | to win in efficiency.
         | 
         | I think it should be done in Swift tbh to get battery impact
         | under 10%
        
         | jasonjmcghee wrote:
         | I took a crack at this, but had trouble building a community.
         | It's all open source.
         | 
         | Native MacOS in swift (the popular one with OCR / text
         | selection from history), and cross platform (rust) without text
         | selection from history and very much POC.
         | 
         | https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/rem
         | 
         | https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/xrem
        
       | ThinkBeat wrote:
       | I would really like the data to be stored... not in the cloud.
       | 
       | Must one set up a S3 compatible stack on a home server somewhere?
        
         | wwoessi wrote:
         | I havent tried yet, but I think we can use
         | https://github.com/minio/minio for this.
        
           | msarchet wrote:
           | Minio works pretty solidly as an s3 compatible endpoint. It
           | took me a while of juggling configuration with Docker to get
           | running correctly though
        
       | squeegee_scream wrote:
       | Excellent! This has been on my todo list for a while now, instead
       | I'll use this and contribute if needed.
        
       | btown wrote:
       | > Hypothesis: the world's most valuable data is screen captures
       | of outlier competent people going about their work. But very
       | little of this data is recorded, let alone made publicly
       | available.
       | 
       | It's not quite screen captures, but the way in which any given
       | email is responded to by competent users in your own organization
       | is highly relevant in this context, especially if you place
       | original+reply email pairs into a RAG framework and add function
       | calls for structured domain knowledge.
       | 
       | Unified APIs like https://www.nylas.com/ which an admin can
       | unilaterally connect across an entire org can make this quite
       | viable - assuming you've done the work to build a culture where
       | radical transparency is seen as an opportunity rather than a
       | threat.
       | 
       | There's a lot of nuance required to avoid hallucinations, but
       | organizations that are merely training chatbots on explicit Q&A
       | documents are just scratching the surface of the depth of their
       | semi-structured data.
        
       | diggan wrote:
       | Based on the repository description:
       | 
       | > Attempt to create an Open Source Privacy Focused Rewind.ai
       | Alternative for data capture
       | 
       | I'd assume this was something local or at least for your local
       | network. But this exclusively sends the data over to S3. And
       | based on the lack of encryption keys or even passwords, I'm
       | assuming this is even unecrypted?
        
         | wwoessi wrote:
         | It is indeed, but we can use our privately hosted S3 compatible
         | server: https://github.com/minio/minio
         | 
         | I'm happy to think about e2e encryption.
        
       | jazzyjackson wrote:
       | capturing and uploading a whole new PNG for each screencap is not
       | what I would call 'efficient', and to meet the use case of
       | Rewind.ai in the first place it should have some OCR mechanism to
       | pull up the relevant screencaps.
       | 
       | The thing that enabled rewind.ai and MS Recall is storing the
       | series of screenshots more like a HEIF, allowing for massive
       | compression ratio and on-device storage + OCR provided by the OS
       | (Live Text since Monterey 2021 [0], Microsoft introduced it last
       | year for Snapdragon based AI-PCs [1])
       | 
       | I guess this is a good starting point if the goal is to fill S3
       | buckets with screencaps of multiple users, but then we're just
       | back to corporate spyware, not tools for helping individuals use
       | their machine more effectively.
       | 
       | That said, if I was using my own minio backend, it would be neat
       | to archive my screen captures but I would change it so it
       | captures after, say, every keystroke, and every time my mouse
       | stops moving, and after every click. That way I have high density
       | capture of taking actions, and low density otherwise. In any case
       | collecting the data is not the issue, making an interface where
       | that data becomes useful to help me remember something is.
       | 
       | [0] https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/interact-with-
       | text-i...
       | 
       | [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/text-
       | recog...
        
         | tomrod wrote:
         | > we're just back to corporate spyware
         | 
         | Most feel that Recall is also this.
        
         | jasonjmcghee wrote:
         | ffmpeg works well, especially on apple silicon using video
         | toolbox. That's how I approached it.
         | 
         | Also, automatically doesn't cost storage for identical
         | screenshots (no activity) and very cheap for just moving your
         | mouse around or typing a few characters.
        
       | ssddanbrown wrote:
       | Your readme states "MIT License - See LICENSE file for details"
       | but there is no such license file. I've been seeing this a lot
       | lately, did you use an LLM to generate this part of the readme?
       | If so, was MIT a concious choice of yours?
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-04 23:00 UTC)