Posthog Session Replay Portable May 2026

While PostHog doesn't offer a specific product named "Session Replay Portable," you can achieve data portability through its robust export and API features. This allows you to "carry" your session data across platforms or preserve it beyond standard retention limits . Making Your Session Replays "Portable"

PostHog offers "portable" coverage for your entire application stack with dedicated SDKs: Web: Capture detailed user interactions on any website. posthog session replay portable

stop(): SessionRecording | null !this.recording) return null; While PostHog doesn't offer a specific product named

1. Spin up a free PostHog Cloud instance (or docker run posthog locally).
2. Enable session replays on your staging environment.
3. Set up an S3 export.
4. Download the posthog-replayer and watch a session from your ~/Downloads folder.

Playback considerations

• Reconstruct DOM snapshots in order and apply event stream to animate user actions.
• Offer controls: play/pause, speed, jump-to-timestamp, event filtering (clicks, inputs).
• Support degraded mode: if assets missing, fall back to DOM-only rendering; show warnings for incomplete packages.

Part 2: What Does "Portable" Mean in PostHog?

In the PostHog ecosystem, portability isn't just a feature; it's an architectural principle. It manifests in four distinct layers: Spin up a free PostHog Cloud instance (or

Implementation Details & Algorithms

• Incremental DOM diffing: use a lightweight mutation-observer based recorder capturing node additions/removals/attribute changes/text updates. Serialize node as id, tag, attrs, text, parentId.
• Node ID mapping: assign stable incremental IDs on initial snapshot. Use a Map in-memory; include mapping in payload metadata to aid replay.
• Scroll & viewport: capture per-frame viewport rects; on replay, set element transforms rather than scroll when feasible to avoid layout shifts.
• Event coalescing: debounce high-frequency events (mousemove, scroll) into sampled frames (e.g., 100ms granularity) with interpolation metadata for smooth playback.
• Compression: gzip payloads, and for binary build consider Brotli. For NDJSON, compress each chunk.
• Offline buffering: use IndexedDB for storing queued chunks; eviction policy LRU by age/size.