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I am looking for a screen recording tool that allows us to continuously record, but recycle (loop) so that only the last 5-10 minutes of activities are recorded.

Scenario: We have a software user who intermittently encounters an issue that we cannot reproduce. Every time we do a screen sharing session with the user, the issue does not present. The goal is to have the screen recorded in a continuous loop so as to not fill up the user's hard drive space. However, once the user encounters the issue, the recording is stopped by the user and submitted to our QA team.

Does such a tool exist? This would be for a Windows system.

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  • Are you also saying there is no way to infer said issue is occuring? Also, how are you categorizing this issue (rendering, under performant, unhandled exception) .. some details would be helpful since a video may not be helpful nor reproducible without correlation to API calls, component performance, .. (introspection a developer would need) Mar 13, 2019 at 21:04
  • For issues we do not find evidence in the extensive error logs we have in place, it is very common in technical support cases to observe the user perform the actions leading to the issue. We have screen sharing tools in place to do so. However, when conducting a session with the user and the issue does not occur then, it would be beneficial to have something else in place that records the last 5-10 minutes. This is a web-based application with a complex combination of field entries and selections. We account for a large number of validation rules, but this issue is escaping us.
    – jbsound
    Mar 14, 2019 at 14:58
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    Have you considered a Chrome Extension like Screencastify or Loom? Personally, I haven't used either so can't comment on their feature sets... but if you need to record a web-based application, then it might be your best bet.
    – dvniel
    Mar 15, 2019 at 11:53
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    I don't know if it has the trimming feature you want, but you might try Flashback as a light-weight recorder. Worst-case, have the user start a new recording every 30 minutes or something if the error didn't happen. flashbackrecorder.com
    – c32hedge
    Mar 15, 2019 at 16:25
  • Thanks for those suggestions. We will check them out. At the moment it looks like we'll need to ask the user to record and recycle the recording while they are working in the web application. Not an unreasonable request.
    – jbsound
    Mar 15, 2019 at 18:59

2 Answers 2

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I have encountered the same problem as yours before. Continually screen recording almost fills up my hard drive space. Recently, I found QAReplay(https://alternativeto.net/software/qareplay/) on an app platform that might help you! It is a cross-platform app, you can try it on Windows! Good luck!

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  • This would be a pretty great solution expect for the 120 second limit on capture. Mar 31, 2021 at 16:43
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Blueberrry TestAssistant would do exactly what you are looking for. It had some other great features like recording the state of other applications, keystrokes, etc. The biggest thing for me was I could leave it recording all day recording the testing I did all day and the resulting filesize was TINY.

Don't quote me -- I haven't used it in years (moved to a macOS shop) -- but I seem to recall the file size after a full day (8 hours) was somewhere under 200mb?. I think we did some tweaking of settings to get the size down. If I recall audio had the potential to add a lot to the size of the file.

Either way, it was an amazing amount of space saving for what it did.

As I write this and try to include a link to the software; It looks like it's no longer called that anymore.
Flashback appears to be the current successor. It's hard to tell from their site if that still has all the features of the old version.

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