I always wanted to do YouTube. The thing that kept stopping me was never the recording. It was everything after.
I am not talking about fancy editing. No motion graphics, no zoom transitions, no five-hour color grade. My problem was dumber than that. Every time I finished a 20 or 30 minute recording, I had to sit there and watch the whole thing again just to find where I messed up. Where I stumbled, where I repeated myself, where I trailed off and started over.
Then, if I wanted shorts or TikToks out of it, I had to watch it a third time, hunting for the 30-second bits that were actually good on their own.
So one recording turned into watching myself talk for an hour before I cut a single frame.
It is hard to explain how much that drains you until you have done it a few times. The recording is the fun part. The rewatching is the part where you quietly decide you are done with YouTube for a while. I quit more than once, and it was always for this exact reason. Not lack of ideas. Just the dread of the rewatch.
The detour I have to admit to
Being a developer, my first instinct was not "fix the small problem." It was "build the big thing."
So I tried to make an AI auto editor. I know there are already plenty of them. I built one anyway, because that is what we do, right. Feed it the video, let it find the mistakes, let it spit out clips, magic.
It was too ambitious, and the output never hit the quality bar I had in my head. AI is great until you need it to be exactly right, and "where exactly are the good moments in my video" turned out to be one of those places where good enough was not good enough. I kept tuning it and it kept being almost.
Eventually I stopped and asked a simpler question. What if I just marked the moments while I was recording, when I already know they happened?
That is Markr.
What Markr actually is
Markr is a tiny desktop app that lets you mark moments while you record.
That is the whole idea. You are recording somewhere else, OBS, your camera, screen capture, whatever you use. Markr runs alongside it. The second you flub a line or say something good enough to clip, you drop a marker. When you are done, you have a clean list of timestamps instead of a flat 30-minute file with no idea where anything is.
So editing stops being archaeology. You go straight to the spot where you stumbled and cut it. You go straight to the moment that would make a good short and pull it. No rewatching the whole thing once, let alone three times.
It does not record your screen. It does not touch your video file. It does not try to be your editor. It just remembers the moments so you do not have to.
It is built with Electron, and it is fully open source:
https://github.com/alexcloudstar/markr
How it works
You start a session. That is your clock. From that point, Markr is just counting time alongside your real recording.
When something happens worth marking, you mark it. Two ways:
- Click the button in the app
- Hit the global hotkey,
Ctrl+Mon Windows and Linux,Cmd+Mon Mac
The hotkey is the part that matters. It works even when Markr is not the focused window, which is the entire point. You are on camera, mid-sentence, you are not going to alt-tab to a little app and click a button. You tap the keys without looking and keep talking. The marker lands and your flow never breaks.
Every marker shows up in a list with its timestamp. When you are done, that list is a map of your recording. Here is where I fumbled the intro. Here is the bit that explains the whole thing in one clean take. Here is the 40 seconds that is basically a short already.
Two markers and a hotkey. That is it.
YouTube is what I built it for, but it is not the only place this hurts. If you record meetings and later have to dig back through an hour of footage for the one decision everyone actually cared about, it is the same problem with a different file. Mark it when it happens, find it in a second later.
Why a separate app and not the big AI thing
Because the small thing actually works, and the big thing did not.
The AI editor was trying to guess after the fact what I already knew in the moment. I am the one recording. I know right when I mess up. I know right when I say something I will want to clip. Capturing that knowledge the instant it happens is trivial and reliable. Reconstructing it later from the raw video is hard and flaky.
There is also something nice about a tool that does one thing. No account. No upload. No cloud, no waiting on a model. Your markers are yours, on your machine, instantly.
It is an MVP, and I am not pretending otherwise
This is early.
Right now Markr does the core loop well: start a session, drop markers with a button or the hotkey, see them in a list. That is enough to be useful today, which is the bar I cared about. But there is plenty it does not do yet.
No labels on markers as you go. No export to formats your editor can import directly. No tagging, no categories, no jumping to a marker by clicking it into a player. Markers live with the session, and that is roughly where the feature set ends for now.
I would rather ship the small version that solves the real problem than sit on a bigger version that solves it in my head. I already tried the bigger version. The roadmap is open, and the most useful direction will probably come from whoever else records and hates rewatching as much as I do. Labels, exports, dropping the markers straight into the tools people actually edit in. That is what I want to add next, in that order, unless someone makes a good case for something else.
If you have ever quit a creative thing because of the boring part after, you know exactly the pain this is for.
If you want to try it
Markr is on GitHub, open source, take it apart however you like:
https://github.com/alexcloudstar/markr
Clone it, run it, drop a few markers during your next recording and see if editing feels less like a punishment. If it helps, great. If a piece annoys you, that is a signal, and the issues tab is right there.
I built it for myself first, the way most of these small things start. No pressure to adopt it, no promises about where it goes.
Just a small fix for the one annoying thing that kept talking me out of doing the thing I actually wanted to do.
Top comments (0)