DisplayMovie
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v1.0.1 · Designed for macOS · $19 lifetime

A quiet timelapse of every day on your Mac.

Captures every 1 second to 3 hours, drops identical frames, stitches what's left into a daily film. Search visible text. Ship it to YouTube. Stays entirely on your machine.

Download for Mac See what it does ›

7-day free trial · $19 one-time, lifetime updates, up to 5 Macs · Apple Silicon · macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

DisplayMovie Dashboard — sidebar with Overview / Settings / Sharing groups, three stat cards (Frames captured, Active time, Apps seen), captures-by-hour bar chart and top-apps list.
Capture

Set your interval. Forget about it.

From every second to every three hours. Tap a chip or dial in a custom h : m : s. Multi-display selection composites preserving your arrangement. The app gently warns you under 30 s when the storage math turns serious.

  • Strict pixel-exact dedupe via SHA-256 of raw RGBA
  • Auto-pause on lock, sleep, low battery
  • Per-display Retina-aware composition
Capture settings: interval chips, h-m-s stepper, display picker, pause toggles.
Output

The math, made visible.

Three live tiles recompute the instant you nudge the interval. The daily MP4 lands at midnight — or whenever you say.

0.10/min

captures per minute at a 10-min interval

6.00/hour

what lands in your day folder each hour

144/day

worth ≈ 4.8 seconds at 30 fps

Output settings: capture rate tiles, codec and container segmented controls, FPS stepper.
YouTube Sharing tab: OAuth status, title format, visibility chooser, auto-upload toggle.
Share

Direct to your YouTube channel.

Sign in once via your browser. Pick a title format with placeholders like {date}, {day}, {filename}. Choose visibility. Every daily compile flies up automatically — and optionally deletes the local file once YouTube confirms.

  • OAuth refresh token stored in macOS Keychain
  • Resumable upload via YouTube Data API v3
  • Manual upload button on Dashboard and range-compile sheet
Everything else

Storage, schedule, appearance, about.

Storage settings: folder, retention.

Storage

Pick a folder once. Decide whether to keep PNGs after compile. Pick a retention.

Schedule triggers.

Schedule

Midnight, on quit, on sleep, custom time. Combine any of them.

Appearance settings.

Appearance

Filmstrip, camera, or dot menubar icon. Optional blink. Login at launch.

About + permissions.

About

Both screen-recording permissions in one place — Settings and the picker bypass.

How it works

Four moving parts. One quiet film.

  1. 01

    Capture

    A silent screenshot every 1 s to 3 h via ScreenCaptureKit.

    SCScreenshotManager
  2. 02

    Dedupe

    SHA-256 vs. the previous frame. Identical → dropped.

    CryptoKit · SHA256
  3. 03

    Compile

    Unique frames stitched into one MP4 via AVFoundation.

    AVAssetWriter
  4. 04

    Share

    OCR search, any date range, optional YouTube upload.

    Vision · FTS5 · YouTube
Privacy

Your screen never leaves your Mac.

No telemetry. No analytics. OCR runs locally via Apple Vision. The metadata index is a local SQLite file. Movies live where you tell them to. The only outbound call DisplayMovie ever makes is to YouTube — and only after you explicitly connect.

Local Vision OCR SQLite FTS5 Keychain refresh token No telemetry
Download

Try free for 7 days. Buy once.

Signed and notarized for macOS Gatekeeper. Apple Silicon. Lifetime updates on up to 5 Macs.

Download .dmg   Buy ($19) ›

v1.0.1 · Apple Silicon · ≈ 5 MB · 7-day trial then $19 one-time

Requires
macOS 14 Sonoma or later
Architecture
Apple Silicon (arm64)
Permissions
Screen Recording
Distribution
Signed & notarized DMG
License
Proprietary © XploreDatum
FAQ

Quick answers.

Does it slow my Mac down?

Captures take a few hundred milliseconds via ScreenCaptureKit on your chosen interval. The default 5-minute cadence is undetectable in practice. SHA-256 over a Retina frame is < 100 ms on Apple Silicon.

How much disk space?

Retina PNGs run 1–5 MB each. At 5-min intervals over an 8-hour day, expect ~300–500 MB before dedupe. With Keep screenshots after compile off, the day's PNGs are deleted once the MP4 is built.

Why two permission prompts on first launch?

macOS gates screen recording twice — a coarse "Screen Recording" toggle in System Settings, plus a per-app dialog asking to "bypass the system picker". The first-launch wizard surfaces both inline.

Intel Macs?

Currently Apple Silicon only. The codebase compiles for x86_64 but ScreenCaptureKit's performance on Intel hasn't been tuned, so we don't ship that build yet.

Other upload targets?

YouTube is fully implemented in v1.0. Google Drive, Dropbox and S3 destinations are scaffolded in the UI and ship working in v1.1.

How does the trial work?

7 days from first launch, full access to every feature. After that, capture and compile are paused until you paste a license key (Settings → License). Existing captures and movies stay accessible regardless.

Refunds?

Yes — 14 days, no questions, via Polar's customer portal.

Updates?

Drop the latest signed DMG over the previous one. Settings, screenshots, and movies are preserved across versions. Updates are included for the lifetime of the license.