OpenScreen 2

OpenScreen is a free, open-source screen recorder and video editor for Windows, macOS and Linux. A raw capture goes in and a finished demo comes out: you record your screen, and the app turns the take into something presentable on the first attempt. It is built for anyone who needs to show software, a website or a workflow on screen — developers, makers, product teams and people recording demos — and who want the result to look deliberate without commissioning an editor or re-shooting. It is MIT licensed, carries no watermark, requires no account, and performs recording, transcription and rendering on your own machine. Screen recordings usually look worse than the thing being recorded. A cursor crawls across the frame at the wrong size, the desktop wallpaper competes with the interface, dead air and filler words fill the audio track, and something private can flash by in a password field. Fixing that normally means a second pass in a video editor, or a re-shoot. OpenScreen addresses the category Screen Studio defined: a tool that records the screen and then frames, zooms, captions and cuts the result so it reads as intentional rather than improvised. It continues the original OpenScreen project, which its creator archived after v1.5.0, and moves the whole pipeline — capture, transcription, styling and render — onto the local machine. Recording uses the capture path each operating system itself provides, not a workaround layered on top. macOS goes through ScreenCaptureKit, Windows through Windows Graphics Capture, and Linux through PipeWire and the ScreenCast portal; on Windows, system audio works without an extra driver. You pick a window or a display before you start. Crucially, the pointer is recorded as data rather than burned into the pixels. That separation is the reason the cursor can be restyled, resized and smoothed after the take, and the reason zooms can be planned from where you actually clicked rather than guessed at from the image. Once a take exists, the editor styles it. You can put an image, a color or a gradient behind the recording, so a narrow window or an odd desktop no longer forces a re-shoot. Framing controls include padding, motion blur, shadow and roundness, and every effect composites live while you adjust it. The cursor gets its own controls: size, smoothing, motion blur and click bounce, so every move reads on screen. Five cursor packs ship with the app — Studio Ink, Prism Glow, Pop Coral, Pixel Candy and Star Sprout — and each can be drawn as a 3D object with a shadow. Zooms are where the tool is most distinctive. Each zoom can stay flat, turn the screen left or right, or orbit it while following the zoom's focus, with depth of field softening the far side — a 3D camera move rather than a crop. Around the screen you can place device frames: a window, a laptop, a phone or a plain screen, in a light or a dark treatment, over a background animated with Drift, Aurora or Waves. Webcam layouts cover picture in picture, dual frame, vertical stack, or no webcam at all, and a Full Camera stretch can give part of the timeline to the camera as it grows to full screen and then eases back. A segmentation model separates you from the room on your own computer, with nothing uploaded, and the same area supports blur, cut out or replace. The same take can be framed for 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:3, 4:5, 16:10 or 10:16. Blur regions — smooth or mosaic, as a rectangle, an oval or a freehand shape — cover an email, a key or a password before the video is shared. The timeline is where edits land. Zooms, speed ramps, trims and comments each appear as a pill on the timeline. Zooms are placed automatically: each take is zoomed where you clicked, by a fixed rule, with no AI and no network call, and this can be turned off in Record mode. Transcript editing takes a different approach — the video is edited like text. Delete a word or a silence in the transcript and the cut lands on the timeline, non-destructively. That is a faster way to strip filler and pauses than scrubbing an audio waveform, and it keeps every edit reversible. Transcription runs on your machine. whisper.cpp ships with the app, the model downloads once on first use at 264 MB, and after that it works with the network off; the audio never leaves the laptop. It covers 100 languages. What comes back is editable text: you set the typeface, the size, the color and the position, then burn it into the render. Export writes the file locally — MP4 from 720p up to source resolution, at 24, 30 or 60 fps, encoded in H.264, or a GIF. The encode runs on your machine and counts frames while it does. There is no queue, no account and no watermark, and the file is on disk when the bar fills. An AI agent goes further than the click-based zoom rule. Given a provider key that you supply — off by default, and nothing runs until you connect one — the agent reads the actual transcript and the actual timeline, so it answers with timecodes you can go and check: which spans it will cut, and how much that saves. Every edit it makes is an ordinary undoable one. The chat panel and caption translation are the places text can leave the machine, and each needs a key you provide. Taken together, the approach is: capture natively, treat the pointer as data, describe the look before you edit, and keep everything local. The finished-frame defaults — wallpaper, padding, shadow, rounded corners and a little motion blur — are on before you touch anything, so the first export already looks deliberate. Edits are expressed as objects on a timeline rather than baked into pixels, which is why a cursor can be restyled after a take and why deleting a transcript word becomes a normal cut. The AI layer, where it is used, reads that structure instead of acting as a black box. The outcome is a demo that looks finished on the first take. Because the pointer is separate data, a recording made with an awkward cursor can be restyled afterward. Because transcription is offline, sensitive audio stays on the laptop. Because export is local, there is no queue to wait in and no upload to trust. Because the license is MIT, there are no paywalls, no premium tier and no usage caps — every feature ships free for personal and commercial use. OpenScreen is one source tree with native capture on each platform. Distribution includes a Microsoft Store listing (winget install --source msstore OpenScreen) and an .exe installer for Windows; a signed and notarized .dmg for macOS, where cursor shape and clicks activate once Accessibility is granted; and .deb, .rpm, .pacman, an AppImage and a Nix flake for Linux, which needs PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal. The .exe installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen warns before it runs. The interface ships in 15 languages: English, Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. In short, OpenScreen is a free and open-source answer to the screen-demo problem: record natively, frame the result automatically, restyle the cursor, cut by editing the transcript, transcribe offline and export locally — with an optional AI agent that proposes edits you can verify, and no account, watermark or upload anywhere in the process.