getopenscreen/openscreen

A free, open-source desktop app for recording your screen and turning the result into polished product demos and walkthroughs.

A raw capture goes in and comes out ready to post — on X, Reddit, YouTube, a docs page, or a landing page. That is the category Screen Studio defined; OpenScreen is the open-source entry in it, and not a clone.

100% free for personal and commercial use, with nothing held behind a paywall.

Project status. OpenScreen is under active development — expect rough edges and occasional breaking changes, including to the .openscreen project format and the CLI. Bug reports are welcome: open an issue.

• Record a specific window, or your whole screen.
• Record microphone and system audio.
• Webcam overlay with picture-in-picture, eight snap positions, adjustable roundness, mirroring, and shape options.
• Auto or manual zooms with adjustable depth, duration, easing, and pixel-precise position; auto-zoom follows your cursor as you work.
• Custom cursor size, smoothing, and click effects, with post-recording path smoothing.
• Automatic captions for voiceovers, transcribed on-device with no upload (works offline), with an editable transcript you can cut from and optional subtitle translation.
• AI editing assistant: describe the edit you want in chat and it applies to the timeline — cuts, zooms, speed ramps, annotations, camera framing. Bring your own key (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, OpenRouter, MiniMax, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint); nothing is enabled by default.
• Wallpapers, solid colors, gradients, or your own background image.
• Motion blur.
• Crop, trim, and per-segment speed control on the timeline.
• Text, arrow, and image annotations, with text animation presets.
• Timeline snapping guides and an audio waveform to make trimming easier.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Export to MP4 or GIF in multiple aspect ratios and resolutions, rendered and encoded on the GPU (Metal on macOS, D3D11 on Windows, Vulkan on Linux) with an automatic CPU fallback.
• Languages supported: Arabic, Czech, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

OpenScreen ships a CLI for scripts, CI, and AI coding agents: record the screen headlessly, edit the .openscreen project JSON programmatically (zooms, annotations, trims), and render MP4/GIF with the full export pipeline — no visible windows, NDJSON output with --json.

openscreen record --duration 20 --project demo.openscreen --json
openscreen export demo.openscreen -o demo.mp4 --json

See the CLI reference.

Paste this into Claude Code:

Install the OpenScreen demo skill with `npx skills add getopenscreen/openscreen --skill openscreen-demo -a claude-code`, then follow it to add a video of this change to the PR.

The skill sets everything up: it installs OpenScreen if it is missing (once you agree), connects its MCP server, then asks you to open a new session and say "continue the OpenScreen demo", the one step an agent cannot do for itself. By hand, it is these two commands, where <executable> is the app's executable on your system (where to find it):

claude mcp add openscreen -- "<executable>" mcp
npx skills add getopenscreen/openscreen --skill openscreen-demo

From then on, ask: "Add a video of this change to the PR." The agent plans the storyboard, records the app, edits the take with OpenScreen's own editing tools, exports the MP4, checks it frame by frame, and attaches it to the pull request, where reviewers watch it in place. Ask for a launch demo instead and it drafts a post for X, which it publishes only once you say yes. Codex and the other clients are in AI editing.

Every platform has a recommended route below. On Windows that is the Microsoft Store; everywhere else it is the installer from the GitHub Releases page.

• Windows: version 1903+ (build 18362) with Intel 8th Gen / AMD Ryzen 2000 series or newer minimum; Windows 11 with Intel 12th Gen / Ryzen 4000 series or newer recommended
• macOS: 13 (Ventura) or later — required by ScreenCaptureKit for capture
• Linux: xdg-desktop-portal and PipeWire for native capture and system audio; recording still works without them through the browser-capture fallback, with fewer capabilities (see Platform differences)
• RAM: 8 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended

Full table and notes on older integrated graphics: system requirements.

Download the .dmg installer directly from the Releases page and drag OpenScreen into your Applications folder. Builds from 1.9.0 onward are signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper does not block them and no terminal step is needed.

On first launch, open System Settings > Privacy & Security and grant the two permissions OpenScreen needs: Screen Recording and Accessibility. Recording cannot start until both are granted.

Recommended — Microsoft Store

Get OpenScreen from the Microsoft Store, or from a terminal:

winget install --source msstore OpenScreen

Microsoft signs the Store package during certification, so it installs with no security warning and updates itself.

Alternative — standalone installer

Download the .exe from the Releases page. Installers are provided for both x64 (Openscreen.Setup.<version>-x64.exe) and ARM64 (Openscreen.Setup.<version>-arm64.exe) — on an ARM64 device the x64 build runs under emulation and records poorly, so take the ARM64 one. Use this if you can't reach the Store — Windows LTSC, a locked-down work machine, an offline install, or if you want a specific older version.

Four packages are published to the Releases page for each version. Pick the one that matches your distro:

Debian / Ubuntu / Pop!_OS (.deb)

sudo apt install ./Openscreen-Linux-*.deb

Fedora / RHEL / CentOS (.rpm)

sudo dnf install ./Openscreen-Linux-*.rpm

Arch / Manjaro (.pacman)

sudo pacman -U Openscreen-Linux-*.pacman

Any distro (.AppImage)

chmod +x Openscreen-Linux-*.AppImage
./Openscreen-Linux-*.AppImage

NixOS / Nix (flake)

Try without installing:

nix run github:getopenscreen/openscreen

Install into your user profile:

nix profile install github:getopenscreen/openscreen

For a NixOS system config (flake):

{
  inputs.openscreen.url = "github:getopenscreen/openscreen";

  outputs = { nixpkgs, openscreen, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations.<host> = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        openscreen.nixosModules.default
        { programs.openscreen.enable = true; }
      ];
    };
  };
}

For Home Manager, use openscreen.homeManagerModules.default with the same programs.openscreen.enable = true;.

You may need to grant screen recording permissions depending on your desktop environment.

Sandbox error: If the AppImage fails to launch with a "sandbox" error, run it with --no-sandbox:

./Openscreen-Linux-*.AppImage --no-sandbox

Everything in the editor and export is the same on macOS, Windows, and Linux: zooms, backgrounds, motion blur, crop/trim/speed, blur regions, annotations, auto-captions, AI editing, projects, export, and all languages. All three now record through a native capture pipeline; the remaining differences are narrower than they used to be:

• Native recording: macOS (ScreenCaptureKit), Windows (Windows Graphics Capture), and Linux (PipeWire via the ScreenCast portal) all record through a native pipeline for higher quality and clean window-level capture. On Linux the browser pipeline stays as an automatic fallback if the helper isn't available.
• Custom cursors: on macOS and Windows the real cursor is captured with shape, type, and clicks. Linux captures position and cursor shape through the portal, so the editable cursor overlay works there too. Click effects work on Linux as well, but not through the portal — Wayland exposes no portal for mouse buttons, so the capture helper reads the left button from evdev, which needs read access to your mouse: a udev rule for pointer devices (recommended) or the input group, set up as Mouse clicks on Wayland shows. Without that, recording is unaffected and every cursor sample is simply a move.
• Webcam: every platform saves the webcam as a separate file next to the screen recording. Windows captures it natively in the recording helper; macOS and Linux record it in the app. It works as a picture-in-picture overlay on all three.
• System audio support varies by OS:
  • macOS: works on every supported version. On macOS 14.2+ you'll be prompted to grant audio capture permission.
  • Windows: works out of the box.
  • Linux: needs PipeWire (default on Ubuntu 22.04+, Fedora 34+). Older PulseAudio-only setups may not capture system audio (mic should still work).

This repository is the community-maintained continuation of OpenScreen.

Official / trusted links:

• Original archived repository: https://github.com/siddharthvaddem/openscreen
• Community continuation: https://github.com/getopenscreen/openscreen
• Official website: https://getopenscreen.com

For safety, download OpenScreen only from the official GitHub Releases linked from this repository. Third-party websites using the OpenScreen name are not affiliated with this continuation unless explicitly listed here.

OpenScreen is community-driven. If you need help, want to report a bug, or just want to chat with other users and contributors:

• 💬 Discord — Join the OpenScreen Discord for real-time help, showcase, and discussion
• 🐞 GitHub Issues — bug reports and feature requests
• 🗺️ Roadmap — see what we're building next
• ❤️ Support the project — GitHub Sponsors or Ko-fi

This project is licensed under the MIT License. By using this software, you agree that the authors are not liable for any issues, damages, or claims arising from its use.