MacCam

Turn your Mac into a private, offline motion-detecting security camera.

MacCam lives in your menu bar, watches the camera for motion, and records clips to a local folder when something moves. It runs fully offline — no cloud, no account, no network code at all — as a lightweight background agent that leans on the Mac's hardware HEVC encoder to stay easy on CPU and battery.

A free, local-only alternative to subscription surveillance apps.

Features

• 🎥 Maximum resolution, automatically — probes the device and picks the largest available format, so the built-in FaceTime camera records at 1080p and external USB / Continuity cameras up to 4K with no configuration.
• 🎯 Flexible triggers — record continuously, on motion (downscaled vImage frame differencing, throttled to ~12 Hz), on voice (on-device speech detection), or on motion and voice. Continuous skips motion analysis to save CPU.
• 🔴 Efficient recording — HEVC (or H.264) via the hardware encoder, with a cooldown after the trigger, seamless clip rotation, and optional pre-roll.
• 🔇 Audio options — record sound alongside video, choose the microphone, or record audio only (no video, saved as .m4a) when the camera isn't needed.
• 🗺️ Detection zones — paint a 16×9 ignore mask over a live camera preview to skip busy areas (a swaying tree, a street) and cut false triggers.
• ⏰ Weekly schedules — auto start/stop monitoring within a time window, and gate recording to its own window (per-weekday, overnight supported). A manual Start always takes priority.
• 💽 Disk-space limits — cap total clip size and/or keep a minimum amount of free space, then loop (delete oldest) or stop & notify.
• 🛡️ Guard mode — start automatically when the screen locks, stop on unlock.
• 🫥 Discreet mode — a neutral menu-bar icon that looks identical whether idle, monitoring, or recording, so onlookers can't tell the camera is active.
• 🔒 Private by design — no network entitlements, no uploads, no telemetry. Clips stay in a folder you choose (local disk, external drive, or NAS).
• 🌍 English & Russian interface, launch at login, and auto-cleanup of old clips.

Note on privacy indicators: while the camera is active, macOS shows its own green "camera in use" indicator and the hardware LED lights up. This is a system anti-spyware feature that no app can disable — MacCam's own icon can be discreet, but the OS will still signal that the camera is on.

Requirements

• macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or newer
• Apple Silicon or Intel Mac with a camera
• Xcode 15+ (to build from source)

Install

Download a release

Grab the latest MacCam-*.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag MacCam to Applications.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/polyackiy/MacCam.git
cd MacCam
make install        # builds Release and copies MacCam.app to /Applications

Or open MacCam.xcodeproj in Xcode and run (⌘R).

Gatekeeper: builds are ad-hoc signed, not notarized with an Apple Developer ID, so the first launch may be blocked. Right-click the app → Open, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/MacCam.app.

On first launch, grant camera (and microphone, if you enable audio) access when prompted.

Usage

1. Click the MacCam menu-bar icon → Start Monitoring.
2. When the trigger fires (motion, voice, or always — per your settings), a clip records and stops after the cooldown.
3. Clips are saved to ~/Movies/MacCam/ by default (configurable).
4. Settings… opens a sidebar window with grouped sections:
   • Camera — device, resolution, FPS, audio capture + microphone
   • Detection — trigger mode, motion sensitivity + zones, voice sensitivity
   • Recording — clip length, cooldown, pre-roll, audio-only, codec/quality
   • Schedule — guard mode and the weekly monitoring / recording windows
   • Storage — destination folder, usage, auto-cleanup, disk limits
   • General — menu-bar icon style and launch-at-login
5. Open Clips Folder… reveals your recordings.

Build & test

make build     # xcodebuild Release
make test      # run the unit + integration test suite
make lint      # SwiftLint (if installed)

Architecture

A single AVCaptureSession feeds a delegate that computes the recording trigger (motion via vImage, and/or voice via on-device SoundAnalysis) and drives a recording state machine writing AVAssetWriter. Pure logic (sensitivity and voice-threshold mapping, format selection, motion diff, trigger mode, ring buffer, recording FSM, schedules, storage math, file naming) is isolated into testable seams; AVFoundation/AppKit glue is verified by build + an end-to-end recording integration test.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full design.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and our Code of Conduct. Found a security issue? See SECURITY.md.

License

MIT © MacCam contributors