Show HN: I made a web-based, free alternative to Screen Studio

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Initial impressions & use cases

  • Many find the tool impressive, simple to start, and a welcome alternative when Screen Studio is buggy or expensive.
  • Primary use cases mentioned: product marketing, software demos for clients, internal workflow walk-throughs, YouTube/tutorial creation, and “video SOPs” for consultants.

Browser, device & UX issues

  • Doesn’t work on mobile; users say this should be clearly messaged.
  • Early problems on Firefox and Safari (dialog immediately closing); Firefox was quickly fixed, Safari still problematic for some.
  • Issues reported with portrait monitors, USB cameras (wrong camera chosen), and confusing onboarding text like “Return here after selecting your screen.”
  • Trimming UX is unclear; a visible “cut” button initially did nothing.

Recording length, format & quality

  • Capture uses getDisplayMedia, outputting MP4/WebM via a custom rendering pipeline.
  • No hard length limit; tested mostly up to ~15–30 minutes, with caution advised for 1–2 hour recordings.
  • Some users report poor output quality and aggressive automatic zoom tied to mouse movement, with no obvious way to disable it.
  • Comparisons drawn to tools that preserve sharp zoomed-in text and to OBS plus post-encoding with tools like HandBrake.

Cloud storage, privacy & self‑hosting

  • Videos are uploaded to S3 and deleted after a few days; multiple commenters insist this must be clearly disclosed and accompanied by a privacy policy.
  • Several users strongly prefer fully local recording or self-hosted deployments (Docker, pay-once licensing, better control over encoding and privacy).
  • Others argue cloud hosting enables interactive features and analytics, and that privacy can be mitigated via encryption schemes.

Features, gaps & roadmap

  • Requested features:
    • Better cursor animation (smoother, configurable size/visibility).
    • Clip trimming, clip speed changes, local download button.
    • Title cards/intro–outro, text notes/overlays, inserting other clips or images.
    • Higher-quality output, option to disable zoom, masking of sensitive data that follows scrolling.
    • Offline/desktop versions.

Business model, open source & ethics

  • Some push for open source and “for posterity” self-hosting; others counter this is incompatible with sustainability for a solo dev.
  • Debate over “pay once” vs subscription; several endorse a lifetime/self-hosted license.
  • A few express cynicism that the free app will evolve into an ad-heavy, gated, upselling service.
  • There is discomfort from some that the product closely imitates Screen Studio’s style and flow; others frame this as normal competition under capitalism.

Technical implementation notes

  • Custom animation/rendering engine inspired by ReMotion, running on AWS Lambda.
  • Cursor tracking uses a custom-trained YOLO model because getDisplayMedia doesn’t expose cursor coordinates.
  • System audio capture is constrained by browser/OS support; Chrome/Chromium on some platforms offers the most capability.