Recording and playback

Turn on recording

On the Devices page, each device has a switch in the Recording column. Turn it on to start continuous recording. On the playback page, cameras without recording turned on also show a Turn on automatic recording button.

• Continuous recording records only one stream: the device’s default stream (usually the main stream).
• Event recording needs no switch. When an event (motion detection, an alarm, AI recognition) happens on a camera without continuous recording, Rerinku View records that period automatically. The length is “event duration + 5 seconds”, and it’s extended if the event triggers again during that time. The event duration defaults to 20 seconds. Change it under Settings → General → Events.
• Event recordings from cameras try to include a few seconds before the event (about 4 seconds for camera events, about 5 seconds for AI recognition), provided Rerinku View was already receiving that camera’s video at the time.
• Devices connected with the Rerinku View SDK and Rerinku Cam phones don’t do event recording yet. If you need recordings from them, turn on continuous recording.
• There are no recording schedules (recording by time of day) yet.

Where recordings are stored

Recordings are saved under recordings/ in the data directory (by default ./data/recordings), in folders by device and date:

recordings/
  <device SN>/<stream>/<UTC date>/20261013T051001Z_600.mp4
                                  20261013T051001Z_600.webp

• Each file is one MP4 segment (10 minutes by default, aligned from UTC midnight each day, and always split at the day boundary). You can open it directly in a video player. The .webp next to it is the preview image used by the playback timeline.
• A file that’s still being written has no _seconds at the end of its name. If the power cuts out suddenly, at most the last few seconds are lost, and Rerinku View repairs the file automatically when it starts.
• Folders and dates are split by UTC. The calendar on the playback page shows dates in the browser’s time zone.
• The files themselves are the source of truth for recordings. The recording index in the database is only a cache, and Rerinku View reconciles it with the files at startup and every hour.

Capacity and cleanup

Set these under Settings → Storage → Local recordings. Changes take effect as soon as you save:

Setting	Default	Notes
Capacity limit	100 GiB	The most space recordings can take up in total; 0 means no limit
Minimum free space	2 GiB	How much disk space to always keep free
Keep for	No limit	Recordings older than this many days are deleted

Cleanup rules:

• Cleanup works one file at a time and deletes the oldest first. Files being written are never touched.
• When remote storage is on, recordings that have already been uploaded only have their local copy deleted. The remote copies can still be played back as usual.
• If no more space can be freed (only files being written are left), all recording pauses. The recording switches stay as they are, and recording resumes automatically once space is available again. If there isn’t enough space at the moment recording starts, you’re told it failed and the switch turns back off.
• Deleting a device doesn’t delete its recordings. They’re cleaned up under the rules above when they expire.

The Recording storage card at the top of the Devices page shows how the recording disk is used. The total is the capacity of the whole disk, and the space used by recordings and by other files on the disk is shown separately. A warning appears when the disk is 95% full, and the status turns critical at 98%.

Remote storage

Under Settings → Storage → Remote storage, you can also upload recordings to S3-compatible storage (AWS S3, MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Alibaba Cloud OSS and others) or WebDAV:

Setting	Notes
Storage location	S3: endpoint, region, bucket, access keys, and whether to use path-style access. WebDAV: URL, username, password
Key prefix	Defaults to rerinku/<instance ID>
Keep locally	How many hours to keep the local copy after upload; 0 means the local copy is deleted only when space runs low
Total retention	How many days to keep recordings in total. When they expire, the remote copy is deleted first, then the local one; 0 means never delete by age
Upload limit	Limits upload bandwidth
Playback delivery	Through Rerinku View (proxy, the default: forwarded by Rerinku View) or Browser fetches from storage directly (redirect, S3 only: the browser downloads straight from storage, and the bucket needs a CORS configuration)

• Recordings are always written locally first, then uploaded in the background once each file is closed, most recent hour first. Uploads mirror the local folder structure, so the remote storage is itself a complete set of recordings.
• Turning off Upload recordings only pauses uploading and freeing local space. Recordings already in remote storage can still be played back as usual.
• If some recordings exist only in remote storage, changing the storage location asks you to confirm again.

Playback

The Playback page in the sidebar:

• Left panel: a month calendar, with a dot on each day that has recordings. Pick a camera under Select a channel. Back to today jumps to the latest recording.
• Timeline: the playhead stays fixed in the middle, and you drag the time. Click a position to play from there. Use the scroll wheel or ± to zoom, across 8 levels from 5 minutes to 24 hours. Events are shown as triangle markers and can be filtered by type. Hovering over the timeline shows a preview image.
• Controls: play/pause, previous/next segment, skip back/forward 10 seconds, speed (0.5×, 1×, 2×, 4×), snapshot (saves the current frame as a JPEG), volume and fullscreen. Devices with multiple streams can also switch streams, with a mark showing whether each stream has recordings.
• Keyboard shortcuts: Space to play/pause, ← → to skip back/forward 5 seconds, f for fullscreen, m to mute.
• Watching live: for a camera that’s recording, you can Jump to the latest recording. Playback is then marked Live recording, with how many seconds it lags behind the live view and a link to jump to the live view.

The playback page’s address records the device, date, stream and event range, so you can bookmark it or send it to someone (the playback position is not recorded). You can also get there from Playback in the device menu, from global search (⌘K / Ctrl+K), or from View in playback in an event dialog.

Exporting video files isn’t supported yet. If you need a file, copy the MP4 directly from the recordings/ folder.

Video recorded by devices

Devices that use the Rerinku View SDK (and Rerinku Cam) can record on their own while they can’t reach Rerinku View, and upload once they reconnect. Rerinku View places this video on the timeline by recording time. It plays back and uploads to remote storage just like Rerinku View’s own recordings. See Device SDK.