No install, and no upload either
Screen recorders are one of the most reliably annoying categories of software. The free ones stamp a watermark across your video or cap you at five minutes. The good ones want a subscription. Several of the web based ones upload the recording to their servers as you record, which for a screen recording is an unusually intimate thing to hand over.
None of that is necessary any more. Browsers have a built-in capture interface and a built-in media recorder, and between them they do the entire job. This page wires the two together, adds a couple of options, and gets out of the way.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: no watermark, no length cap from any service, no account, and the recording never leaves your machine. Your screen might contain a client’s dashboard, a private message or a partly filled form, and none of that is something to upload for the sake of a convenience.
Recording a demonstration
- Tick Include microphone audio if you want to narrate. Leave it off for a silent capture.
- Set Recording quality to Smooth (30 fps, larger file) or Smaller file (15 fps).
- Click Screen Recorder. The page tells you it is waiting for permission.
- Your browser opens its own sharing dialog. Choose a tab, a window or a whole screen, and grant permission.
- Recording begins and a live preview appears with a recording indicator.
- Click Stop Recording when you are done. The button changes while the file is being finished.
- Play the result back in place, then use the download link, which is named for the moment you finished.
- Record another clears everything for the next take.
The sharing dialog belongs to the browser, not to this page. That is a security boundary rather than a limitation: no web page is allowed to decide what it captures, which is exactly the guarantee you want.
How audio is put together
Audio here is more involved than it looks, because a screen recording can have up to two sources and they arrive separately.
Alongside the video, the browser is asked for audio. Whether any arrives depends on your browser, your operating system and what you picked in the dialog. Sharing a tab in a Chromium browser will commonly offer that tab’s audio. Sharing an entire screen frequently offers none, and that is normal rather than a failure.
If you also ticked the microphone option, a second and completely separate stream is requested. When both exist, they are mixed into one audio track through the browser’s audio graph rather than being attached to the recording as two tracks. That distinction matters: a file with two parallel audio tracks plays back inconsistently across players and editors, and many will simply use the first and ignore the other.
When only one source exists, it is used directly with no mixing. When neither does, the recording is silent, which is the correct outcome rather than an error.
A denied microphone permission does not abort anything. The recording carries on with whatever audio it did get, on the reasoning that losing the whole take over an optional extra would be worse than a missing narration track.
Frame rate, and what the number really means
The two options set a hint for the browser rather than a hard target. Ask for thirty and a busy machine capturing a large screen may deliver fewer; ask for fifteen and you will get at most fifteen.
Thirty is right for anything moving. Scrolling, video playback, an animated interface, a game: at fifteen these look visibly stuttery.
Fifteen is right for a slide presentation, a code walkthrough, or any demonstration where the screen mostly sits still and changes in discrete steps. It roughly halves the file size and nobody watching will notice.
The container is WebM, using the best codec combination the browser supports, chosen from an ordered list that falls back gracefully rather than failing when a preferred codec is missing.
Afterwards
WebM plays in every browser and in most modern players, but it is still the format that occasionally gets refused by an upload form or an older editor. WebM to MP4 converts it.
For editing the take, Trim Video removes the fumbling at the start and end, Crop Video tightens the frame onto the part that matters, and Merge Videos joins segments if you recorded in pieces to keep memory use sane. Mute Video strips audio you would rather replace.
For narration without the screen, Voice Recorder captures the microphone alone. Teleprompter scrolls a script for you while you record, and Annotate Screenshot covers the case where a still image would have done the job. The rest is on the video tools hub.