Show HN: Screenity – Open source screen recorder and annotation tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Screenity – Open source screen recorder and annotation tool

github.com

103 pointsalyssaxuu34 comments

After trying out some of the most popular screen recorders for Chrome, I realized how lacking and limited many of them were. So I decided to create the most powerful screen recorder for Chrome, completely free and open source, with lots of features such as freedrawing, text, arrows, multiple cursor options, push to talk, custom countdowns, editing, and much more.

Let me know what you think! I have also created a Google Sheet where I compared my tool to 30+ of the most popular Chrome Extensions in the area in terms of features: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1juc1zWC2QBxYqlhpDZZU...

looks very impressive! any plans for a non-chrome / standalone version?

Thanks! I don't have any plans personally - I have made it open source so anyone can make their own version, maybe even port it to Firefox (which AFAIK shouldn't be too hard). As per standalone, I feel like it would have to be entirely rewritten, so it would basically mean developing it from zero.

Great work! This definitely will replace the other tools I use to record stuff in the browser!

You're really a genius. 19 and you create all this amazing graphics stuff, with amazing UX. Wow! What's your story for getting into software?

Haha I turned 20 just a couple months ago :P Thanks!

I've been coding from a very young age, I started at ~7 with Visual Basic making all sorts of programs, and Action Script in Flash for creating simple games. I've just been always had a lot of ideas I wanted to execute on, so whenever I thought "I wish X existed" I just learnt how to make it myself. That's how I got into web development specifically, at high school I wanted to have a better way to organize my homework and events so I built a collaborative task manager with many features (tags, Gantt chart with tasks starting when another ended, shared tasks between other students via teams, different priority assigned to tasks, choosing to see tasks only within a specific timeframe...), all without any prior knowledge of PHP or Javascript. I just watched a lot of tutorials and read through guides and I built it in a few months.

Cool to hear stories like this.

I started around 18yrs old with irc bots, then wordpress, php, js, nodejs, ts, rust etc.

The programmer's life can at times feel effortless when it's driven by a passion to create.

I’ve made a note to sponsor this project on Monday, we’ll be using this commercially and would very much like to thank you - it’s incredible, beautiful and unbelievably generous.

If you’re ever looking for work (and with your skill set I highly doubt you will be) please reach out to me.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!

Looks great! Isn't it easy to port this to Firefox? Or are they stricter about permissions used in FF for such an extention?

It should be easy yeah, maybe in the future I (or someone else using the code from the repo) could port it to Firefox.

This is incredible...I wish that you're gonna go far and be successful in your career, we need more people like you. I bet all my HN karma you will do great. Kudos!

I’m on mobile but can’t wait to try it. Very impressed not with your product but with the research you’ve done. That GoogleSheet is extensive as hell.

Thanks! I spent several days searching for screen recorder extensions and trying them out one by one. It was helpful to understand all the features Screenity needed, not just based on what was available in the extensions, but also from what people complained about in the reviews. On top of that I also tried some desktop screen recorders to add unique features such as push to talk or individual audio controls while recording (system/microphone) which aren't a thing in any other Chrome Extension.

Your extension is incredible! Absolute game changer. Would you mind allowing the toolbar to be completely hidden or positioned elsewhere? The current position hides UI elements that I want to show people and I can't click on anything. If I use show on hover it pops up in the middle of the interaction.

Thank you! Maybe there could be a shortcut to hide it, or the option to place it elsewhere, hm. I might think of some solution for this, although I'm not sure when I'll be able to look into it. You could modify the CSS in the content.css file in GitHub for the toolbar to be positioned elsewhere & then compress everything and throw it on chrome://extensions in developer mode if you want to have it changed right away :P

Works like a charm. Some well-placed `display: none !important` sprinkled everywhere did the trick.

Very useful.. Thanks for making this! Will be trying it out!

It doesn't have any tracking or phoning home does it?

Thanks :) It absolutely does not, I didn't even set up a user system (unlike most other screen recorders) for that reason. For privacy purposes in any case the code is open source - I was thinking about adding a section in GitHub on how to self-host it (zipping the contents and dragging them over chrome://extensions in developer mode might work except for the "save to drive" functionality which is tied to a client ID for the app).

That's great, thanks for sharing this! I can't wait for the Firefox version ;)

Thanks! I might work on a Firefox version since there seems to be a lot of people interested, porting shouldn't be that hard: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/10/porting-chrome-extensions-...

Looks great, the only concern I have is about privacy and couldn't find anything.

Thanks, in terms of privacy if you're worried you're free to self host the tool using the code from GitHub instead of installing the extension from the Chrome Store. But it doesn't store any data whatsoever, it's all client-side.

Outstanding tool, looking forward to using it much more. Excellent work on this!

Thank you so much!

That's super cool

Recently I've added this feature in https://helppie.me

You are amazing girl! Keep it up

Firefox. Firefox. Firefox.

There's an issue with porting to Firefox unfortunately: https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity/issues/3#issuecomment...

Cool! But really, Firefox needs all the love it can get these days.

I have been porting the extension to Firefox, but I ran into a problem with getDisplayMedia (to record the screen). Apparently it can only be run through a user gesture (DOM event), but I have to run it from the background script in order to be persistent at all times, no matter if the popup is closed or the user closes or navigates away from certain tabs. It explains the lack of screen recorders for Firefox, the few I found have the workaround of opening a separate tab with a button to start recording, but it is extremely counter-intuitive, plus if the user closes that tab at any time, the recording would automatically stop. Here's the discussion in the repo if you'd like to share your thoughts, I could do that same workaround myself but I'm not fond of releasing an unintuitive product: https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity/issues/3#issuecomment...

I wish I could help, but you're light-years ahead of me. Very cool that you're giving it a try!

this is amazing. thanks for making it. how long did it take you?

Thank you! It took me around a month to make, it was a pretty straightforward project.

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