IPBT (It’s Play-Back Time) is a curses-based terminal recording player designed around one particularly useful capability: accurate backwards navigation through a recorded terminal session.
Traditional ttyrec players can easily pause, accelerate or slow playback because they process terminal data in chronological order. Going backwards is much harder. IPBT solves the problem by processing an entire recording through its internal terminal emulator before playback begins. It stores the resulting changes to the terminal screen in a structure that provides random access to individual frames.
The terminal emulator is derived from PuTTY. Once the initial processing is complete, playback operates on IPBT’s stored screen states rather than repeatedly reading and interpreting the original recording.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Reads ttyrec and nh-recorder terminal recordings.
- Can also process raw terminal recordings when their format is specified explicitly.
- Move forwards or backwards through a recording one frame at a time.
- Jump directly to a specified frame or to the beginning or end of a session.
- Play recordings faster or slower than their original speed.
- Logarithmic time compression reduces long periods of inactivity without excessively accelerating short delays.
- Search forwards or backwards for screen contents containing specified text.
- On-screen display shows the current frame number and playback settings.
- Can automatically start, pause or stop playback at designated frames.
- Accepts multiple recording files and presents their frames as a continuous sequence.
- Supports configurable emulated terminal dimensions or can use the dimensions of the current terminal.
- Offers UTF-8 handling when used with a suitable wide-character curses library.
- Automatically attempts to distinguish between supported timestamped recording formats.
Website: www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/ipbt
Support:
Developer: Simon Tatham
License: MIT License
IPBT is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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