OpenScreen

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

Note

This is OpenScreen, continued. Siddharth Vaddem created the project and archived the original repository after v1.5.0. Development moved here with his approval, under the same name and the same MIT license.

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.

Core Features

• Record a specific window, or your whole screen.
• Record microphone and system audio.
• Webcam overlay with picture-in-picture, drag-to-position, 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 cursor themes and 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, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Command-line interface (headless)

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 docs/cli.md.

Installation

Download the latest installer for your platform from the GitHub Releases page.

macOS

Download the .dmg installer directly from the Releases page. If Gatekeeper blocks the app, you can bypass it by running the following command in your terminal after installation:

xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Openscreen.app

Note: Give your terminal Full Disk Access in System Settings > Privacy & Security to grant you access and then run the above command.

After running this command, proceed to System Settings > Privacy & Security to grant the necessary permissions for "screen recording" and "accessibility". Once permissions are granted, you can launch the app.

Note

Upgrading from an older version and hitting permission issues? If you already had OpenScreen installed and the new version won't record (Screen Recording or Accessibility keep failing even after you grant them), uninstall the old version, remove OpenScreen's existing entries under System Settings > Privacy & Security (both Screen Recording and Accessibility), then do a fresh install and grant the permissions again when prompted.

Windows

Download the .exe installer directly from the Releases page.

Linux

Three 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-latest.deb

Arch / Manjaro (.pacman)

sudo pacman -U Openscreen-Linux-latest.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

Platform differences

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 cursor themes and the editable cursor overlay work there too — but the portal reports no mouse button events, so click effects remain macOS and Windows only.
• Webcam: Windows muxes the webcam natively into the recording; macOS and Linux record it alongside as a separate file. It works as a picture-in-picture overlay on all three.
• System audio support varies by OS:
  • macOS: requires macOS 13+. On macOS 14.2+ you'll be prompted to grant audio capture permission. macOS 12 and below can't capture system audio (mic still works).
  • 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).

Official links

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

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.

Community

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

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License

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.