Screen Studio-style demos from a repo frozen at 1.5.0
OpenScreen records a window or the whole screen, along with the microphone and system audio, and turns the take into a product demo with zooms, a backdrop, trims and an MP4 or GIF export. It is an Electron app under the MIT license, built for macOS, Windows and Linux. The original repository is archived and no longer maintained. Its README points to the getopenscreen/openscreen repository, where the project carries on under the same name.
Zooms that track the cursor, captions transcribed offline
- Auto or manual zooms: depth, duration, easing and position are set to the pixel, and auto-zoom follows the cursor while recording.
- Captions made on the machine: voiceovers are transcribed locally, with no upload, even offline.
- Webcam overlay: a picture-in-picture bubble that can be dragged, mirrored and reshaped.
- Cursor clean-up: size, click effects and themes, plus path smoothing once the recording stops.
- Timeline editing: crop, trim and per-segment speed, with snapping guides and an audio waveform.
- MP4 or GIF export in several aspect ratios and resolutions, from an interface available in 13 languages.
A successor repo and a Linux build that captures less
No release has left the original repo since 1.5.0. That version shipped on June 6, 2026, and the README has announced the archive since June 17. The Homebrew cask it recommends still installs 1.5.0.
Development continues in a separate repository. According to its README, getopenscreen/openscreen took over the project with the creator's approval, keeping the name and the MIT license. Its latest release, 2.1.2, came out on October 19, 2026. That README documents additions missing from the original one: a command-line interface that records, edits the project and exports without opening a window, and export encoded on the GPU. An AI editing assistant runs on the user's own API key and is off by default. The same README warns that the .openscreen project format and the CLI may still change in breaking ways.
The creator calls OpenScreen "not production grade". The README describes a side project that took off and tells users to expect bugs.
The README measures OpenScreen against Screen Studio's $29 monthly subscription. It concedes that some Screen Studio features are missing and aims at quick demos and walkthroughs for X, Reddit or YouTube. Personal and commercial use are both free, and nothing sits behind a paid tier.
Linux capture does less than on macOS and Windows. Those two record through native APIs, ScreenCaptureKit and Windows Graphics Capture. Linux goes through the browser pipeline and only logs the cursor position, so cursor themes and click effects are not available there. System audio requires macOS 13 or later, and PipeWire on Linux.