Screen Recorder

How to use Screen Recorder

1. Choose whether to include your microphone and system audio, then press record.
2. Pick the screen, window or browser tab to capture in the browser’s own picker.
3. Stop when finished. The video downloads directly to your device as WebM.

What can be captured?

Tab capture is the best choice when it fits your need. It records only the tab’s content at its native resolution, includes tab audio on every platform including macOS, and keeps notifications and desktop clutter out of the recording automatically.

System audio capture for the whole screen is a platform limitation rather than a browser one: macOS does not expose a system audio loopback to browsers without a third-party audio driver, which is why the option is greyed out there.

Why is the output WebM rather than MP4?

Because WebM with VP8 or VP9 is what MediaRecorder produces in Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Safari produces MP4 with H.264.

WebM plays natively in every modern browser, in VLC, and in most video editors. What it does not do is upload cleanly everywhere — some older platforms and a few social tools still expect MP4.

Converting is straightforward and lossless in terms of the video stream: ffmpeg -i input.webm -c:v copy -c:a aac output.mp4 remuxes without re-encoding when the codec is compatible. YouTube, Vimeo and every current editor accept WebM directly, so conversion is often unnecessary.

How large will the file be?

Roughly 5–15 MB per minute at 1080p, depending almost entirely on how much the screen changes.

Video compression encodes differences between frames. A recording of a mostly-static document is small, because most frames are nearly identical. A recording of scrolling, video playback or animation is much larger, because every frame differs from the last.

Practical figures: a 10-minute software demo at 1080p typically lands at 60–120 MB. The same 10 minutes with continuous scrolling can reach 300 MB. There is no size limit imposed here — the constraint is your available disk space, since the file is written progressively rather than held entirely in memory.

How does this compare to Loom or OBS?

They occupy different points on the same spectrum.

This tool requires no install, uploads nothing, has no account and no time limit. It records one source to one file. That is the whole feature set.

Loom adds a hosted link, viewer analytics, transcription and a webcam bubble. All of that requires your video on their servers, and the free tier caps recording length and video count.

OBS adds scene composition, multiple sources, overlays, filters and streaming. It is free and enormously capable, and it requires installation plus a genuine learning curve.

For a quick bug report, a walkthrough for a colleague, or a recording of something you would rather not upload to a third party, the browser recorder is the right size of tool. For anything produced regularly or published, OBS is worth the setup.

Frequently asked questions