There's a tradeoff everyone assumes you have to make with recorded streams. Keep them local and they're stuck on the PC at your desk. Put them in the cloud and you can watch anywhere, but now your recordings live on someone else's servers. I never accepted that tradeoff, so I built Obskura to give you both: your files stay on your own machine, and you can still pull them up on your phone from the couch or anywhere else.

Here's how that works, and why it doesn't require handing your recordings to anyone.

The catch with "watch anywhere" cloud recorders

Cloud stream recorders make phone access easy, but only because your recordings sit on their infrastructure. That's the real price. Your videos get uploaded to their servers, often surfaced on public "latest recordings" feeds, and in most cases deleted after a retention window unless you pay to delay it. The convenience of watching on your phone comes bundled with giving up ownership and privacy.

Obskura takes the opposite approach. The recording is written to your hard drive and it never leaves. There's no upload step, no public feed, and nothing of yours sitting on a server I control. So the real question is: how do you watch a file that only exists on your PC, from your phone, without exposing that PC to the internet?

How Obskura streams to your phone without uploading anything

Remote access in Obskura is built on Tailscale, which creates a small private network (a "tailnet") between just your own devices. Your phone talks directly to your PC over that private network. A few things fall out of that design:

• Nothing is exposed to the public internet. You don't set up port forwarding, dynamic DNS, or any router configuration. Random people on the internet can't reach your machine at all.
• Your video doesn't route through my servers. When your phone and PC can reach each other directly, the bytes go peer to peer. Either way, the connection is end-to-end encrypted with WireGuard, no matter what network you're on.
• It's free to run. Tailscale's Personal plan covers your own devices at no cost, and you don't even need to install Tailscale on your recording PC. That part is built into Obskura.

Setting it up takes about a minute

On the desktop, you turn on Remote Access in settings and sign in to a free Tailscale account. On your phone, you install the Tailscale app and sign in to the same account. Then you click Generate code in Obskura, which gives you a 6-digit code that's good for five minutes. Open the link it shows on your phone and enter the code. That's it.

Your phone is now paired and remembers itself for 90 days, so you only do this once per device. From then on, opening the link on your phone shows your full recordings library.

What you can do from your phone

The mobile view is read-only on purpose, and that's a deliberate safety decision, not a missing feature. You can browse your recordings, search by name, sort by date, size, or duration, see the metadata, and play any recording with instant seek. It streams in chunks, so you are not waiting for a whole file to download before it starts.

What you cannot do from the phone is delete, rename, or change any recording or setting. So even in the worst case, a lost or stolen phone, the most anyone gets is read access to your library. And you can revoke that device from your desktop in one click, which kills its access immediately.

You keep the file. You just stop being chained to your desk.

That's the whole point. Your recordings are local files you own forever, with no retention timer and nothing uploaded anywhere, and you can still lie on the couch and watch last night's stream on your phone. Local ownership and watch-anywhere convenience were never actually in conflict. They just had not been built together.

If you want the rest of what Obskura does, the features page has the full picture and the pricing page covers the founder plan.

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