0.51.0: the screen records to the device's own microSD card

[dexif]

0.51.0 is out, and it is the recording release.

A dashcam records the road nobody is watching and keeps the minutes before the bang. This gives a machine the same thing. Press record and the screen goes to the microSD card in the device as H.264 - the same stream the viewers already get, so nothing is encoded twice: on a Function EV, with a video playing on the target, the picture stayed at 21-22 fps while recording and no frame was lost.

What came with it:

• A dashcam. It keeps the recent past of the screen and saves it when something happens: a stop screen, a watched phrase, the target's power LED going off, or a button. The clip becomes an MP4 with a chapter per event, and with notifications on it arrives in Telegram as a video that plays in the chat. The past is kept in PSRAM, or on the card in short pieces for boards that have no PSRAM to spare.
• Keystrokes as subtitles beside the video: "Typed: root", "Ctrl+Alt+Delete", "Left click (812, 440)". Typed text is masked as dots unless you ask for the characters.
• A timelapse: one frame every few seconds, played back at 25 fps, so a night of installing something is a minute of video.
• Playback in the console, streaming from the card - an MP4 in the browser's player, a .ts demuxed in the console and decoded by the same WebCodecs decoder that draws the live picture, with seeking.
• Search over what the screen said during a recording: type a phrase, play from the moment it was on screen. Character screens only - a BIOS, an installer, a console.
• Screenshots to the card, on either codec, and all of it can be started from a runbook, from Home Assistant, or over the REST API.

The write-up, with a short video of a recording that starts before the button was pressed: https://espkvm.io/blog/0-51-0-a-dashcam-for-the-machine-in-the-closet/

0.51.1 and 0.51.2 followed the same day: a private key in a PKCS#8 file is accepted now (#52), a stored certificate that the TLS stack cannot use no longer takes the console with it, and a clip's subtitles start where its picture starts.

If you try the dashcam, I would like to know two things: how far back it reaches on your board, which the recordings panel shows on the button, and whether the events it saves on are the ones you would have chosen. Both are easy to change and I would rather change them for a real setup than for mine.