Recording and playback, kept on your computer

What is recorded

Each camera is set to Off, Motion only or Continuous, from the Settings page or per camera.

• Motion only (the default) keeps the minutes with motion plus one minute before and after. Motion comes from the phone’s battery saver, so the computer doesn’t analyse anything to find it. A phone with battery saver off reports no motion, so Motion only keeps all of its minutes.
• Video only. No sound is recorded, even when the phone streams its microphone.
• Small files. The recorder asks the phone for a second, small stream encoded from the same picture, and records that instead of the live stream.

Quality	Picture	Bitrate
Small	360p, 10 fps	250 kbit/s
Standard (default)	480p, 15 fps	500 kbit/s
High	The live stream	As streamed

On a Xiaomi Pad 7, Standard recorded 3.2 MB per minute instead of about 39 MB for the live stream.

How long it’s kept

Choose 1 day, 1 week (the default), 1 month or 1 year, and optionally a size limit for all cameras together. The oldest recordings go first. Settings show the space used and free and suggest a period that fits, for example “1 week uses about 5 GB of your 310 GB free”. Highlights you save keep their recording until you delete them.

Encrypted at rest

Every minute is encrypted with AES-256-GCM using a random key created on first use. The key lives in your operating system’s keyring: Secret Service on Linux, Keychain on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows. Settings → Recording shows where it is and has Back up key. Details on the security page.

Playback

• Pick a day. A month heatmap shows how much each day recorded and how much had motion. A month for 8 cameras loads in 9–17 ms.
• Pick a moment. Open a day for its 24-hour timeline, click to start there, and play without exporting anything.
• Move fast. Play and pause, step frame by frame, jump to the previous or next motion, at speeds from 0.25× to 100×. From 8× only keyframes are decoded, so 100× used 11–27% of one CPU core in testing.
• Keep a clip. Export 1 minute to 1 hour as an ordinary MP4 into Videos/Camlane, or with camlane-cli recordings export --from 14:05 --for 5m.
• Delete everything. “Delete all recordings” removes every camera’s recordings and what Private AI learned from them, after you confirm.

Who can tell

A phone that is being recorded shows “Recording” on its camera screen and in its notification. Phones with versions too old to show it are marked on the computer. Recording people may need their consent; read recording people: consent and the law before you point a camera at anyone.