khakimov / screentimelapse

Take color-accurate timelapses of your screens and cameras on MacOS

TimeLapze

A open-source menu bar application for creating screen and camera timelapses without excessive file sizes.

Introduction · Features · Installation · Local Development · Tech Stack · Contributing

Introduction

TimeLapze is a open-source, minimalist, menu bar application for creating color accurate screen and camera timelapses without enormous file sizes.

Color accuracy is an important feature which prevents you from recording washed-out, photocopied-looking time lapses.

Features

• Color Accurate: What you see is what you get. Never screen record faded videos again¹
• Minimalist Design: a fully featured web recorder in your menu bar
• Hardware Accelerated: fully utilized hardware accelerated encoding for a lightweight recording experience
• Space Saving: Avoid the excessive file sizes of high quality video (can be as high as 7 GB / hour).
• Camera Recording: Record your webcam or phone with the same frame rate and camera speed
• Secure: Use the fully features of ScreenCaptureKit to only record certain windows, applications and more. Never leak your bank information in recordings again!
• Customizability: Change everything from the frame rate, quality and speed multiple

Installation

The recommended way to install TimeLapze is through Homebrew cask.

brew install --cask https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wkaisertexas/ScreenTimeLapse/main/screentimelapse.rb 

Note: once this repo gets 75 stars and 30 watchers you will be able to install the app using brew install --cask screentimelapse. Additionally, the application is not signed so Apple will give you a scary warning about how the app can not be checked for malware. You can go in system settings to launch it anyways.

Direct Download

If you wish, you can go directly to the releases page and download TimeLapze.zip. Both Chrome and Safari give a warning about downloading suspicious files. Ignore then, extract the archive and you should get a ScreenTimeLapse.app file. Move that file into your Applications directory.

Local Development

To develop TimeLapze locally, you will need to clone and open this repository in XCode.

Once that's done, you can use the following commands to run the app locally:

git clone https://github.com/wkaisertexas/ScreenTimeLapse
cd ScreenTimeLapse
open TimeLapze.xcodeproj

Following this, you need to allow the app to be built for local signining.

Tech Stack

• SwiftUI
• ScreenCaptureKit
• AVFoundation
• CoreMedia

Contributing

We love our contributors! Here's how you can contribute:

• Open an issue if you believe you've encountered a bug.
• Make a pull request to add new features/make quality-of-life improvements/fix bugs.

Repo Activity

License

ScreenTimeLapse is open-source under the MIT Liscense.

If you liked this project, consider giving the repository a star ⭐️! I am trying to get to 75 stars to be added to homebrew

Footnotes

1. Apple's screen recorder convert's the display's color space from DCI_P3 to sRGB. The error is typically subtle, but makes the tool unsuitable for color sensitive work. Color is difficult and even HDR video have persistent issues with overexposure in screenshots. ↩