Mirror

A continuous security-camera recorder for macOS. Mirror captures your built-in (or external) camera and microphone and writes rolling, time-stamped MP4 segments to a folder you choose, automatically pruning old clips. It ships as a lightweight menu bar app plus a set of shell scripts you can run headlessly at login.

Note: the green camera indicator light is a hardware feature on Macs and cannot be disabled. It will be lit the entire time Mirror is recording.

Install

brew install emerytech/mirror/mirror

This installs:

• Mirror.app — the menu bar app (start/stop, settings, recordings folder).
• mirror-record, mirror-status, mirror-prune — the underlying scripts.
• ffmpeg as a dependency.

Homebrew prints the path to Mirror.app after install; open it with open (see the caveats brew shows, or run brew info mirror).

Usage

Menu bar app

Launch Mirror.app. The menu bar icon lets you start/stop recording, open the recordings folder, and configure quality, segment length, retention, camera, microphone, and launch-at-login. macOS will prompt for camera and microphone permission on first record.

Show Mirror opens a live, horizontally-flipped camera preview so you can use it like an actual mirror to check your appearance. The green camera light stays on while the preview window is open.

Headless (record at login, no UI)

To run the recorder as a background service that starts at login:

brew services start mirror

Stop it with brew services stop mirror. Check what's happening with:

mirror-status

Configuration

The scripts read these environment variables (the menu bar app sets them for you):

Variable	Default	Meaning
MIRROR_DIR	~/Documents/SecurityCam	Where clips are written
MIRROR_VIDEO	FaceTime HD Camera	Capture device name
MIRROR_AUDIO	MacBook Pro Microphone	Mic name (empty = video only)
MIRROR_SEGMENT	600	Segment length in seconds
MIRROR_FPS	30	Frame rate
MIRROR_BITRATE	4000k	Video bitrate
MIRROR_RETENTION_DAYS	3	Days of clips to keep
MIRROR_MAX_GB	0	Max folder size in GB (0 = none)

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/emerytech/homebrew-mirror.git
cd homebrew-mirror
./menubar/build.sh        # produces menubar/Mirror.app

To install the headless LaunchAgents from a source checkout:

./install.sh              # uninstall with ./uninstall.sh

License

MIT