OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio | Hacker News Reader

OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio

github.com

434 pointsjskopek73 comments

Looks awesome! Super excited to try it. What are pros / cons over Cap? https://cap.so/ - also open source https://github.com/CapSoftware/cap

This one is free even for commercial usage.

so is cap if one has the will to build from source, no? https://github.com/CapSoftware/Cap/blob/main/LICENSE

For one, OpenScreen supports Linux, whereas Cap doesn't. I appreciate it's small minority that appeals to, it's just that I'm in it.

I've also found https://framecapture.pro to be a super good free alternative to Screen Studio. It's got... literally everything...

Am I in the minority for thinking ScreenStudio is actually worth the money?

The recent video I did for Cling for example (https://lowtechguys.com/cling) I’ve had many people ask about how I did it because it has just the right amount of motion and highlighting. I did it in a few minutes of editing in the ScreenStudio UI.

I’m not saying it’s a great video, but people say it conveys the info well enough and that’s what matters. It would have taken me days to do the same with DaVinci Resolve because of my inexperience with complex editors.

A $30/month subscription is indeed too much, but I see it as a one time payment for that month when I release something, then I pause the subscription. I need it rarely, very few videos need zooming and motion.

Anyway I love to see alternatives like OpenScreen! What I would miss the most would be presets, not sure if it’s already there, but it’s a nice quality of life feature to have a consistent look to the motion effects between videos.

I think it's mostly just that a subscription seems weird for a tool like this. Most users would probably only need it occasionally, and with a subscription you can't just add it to your toolbox to grab when that time comes.

For me it would make more sense to have something like “unlock for a week” if the dev wants to keep the ongoing revenue model. Of course a lifetime purchase is even better, not sure why that’s not an option.

I would be happy to pay $100 for unlimited access and be locked into the current version of the app, maybe only have minor version updates free so you don’t get locked into a buggy version.

But that’s a more complicated licensing model to implement I guess.

IMO a big disservice to the universe has been done with the recurring revenue drive. Many services could/should offer a one-shot option, with the highest margin. Somehow the world got stuck on SaaS model so hard that one off is completely ignored.

I know why the capital class loves MRR I'm just mad that OTC is ignored.

I am struggling with finding a good model for desktop apps. The subscription model always seems to yield the most money, but I too dislike subscriptions.

One-shot option seems attractive, but the desktop (MacOS at least) app market is actually so niche that the SAM is somewhere in the low thousands. So, if I would offer a one-time 100$ app, I'd have 100k$ before taxes. And for that revenue, there's developing, marketing, plus support and maintenance. So to match a dev's salary, I'd need to make 2-3 successful apps a year, that I'd also have to maintain for a long time.

I think maybe there's a mid-ground with buy forever, 1 year updates, so people get the product they paid for, and if they want updates or support the development they can re-buy, however I'm yet to hear opinions on this model.

> I think maybe there's a mid-ground with buy forever, 1 year updates, so people get the product they paid for, and if they want updates or support the development they can re-buy, however I'm yet to hear opinions on this model.

As far as desktop software is concerned, I think this a commonly accepted approach. Sublime Text is probably the most notable example.

Isn't that just how most software used to be sold? If you buy Photoshop CS5 or MS Office 2023 you get the product as it's released and maybe a year of bugfix releases (but no new features). If you want the new features buy Photopshop CS6 or MS Office 2024

Personally I like the model, as long as old versions stay truly static and don't get enshittification updates. It aligns incentives on feature development far better than subscription models: if you make genuine improvements you get recurring sales, if you don't then existing users will just stay on the old version. And existing users are protected from features or UI changes they disagree with

this! i used screen studio maybe 2-3 times over the course of 3 months

If you only need it occasionally doesn’t subscription make sense? Just pay for the months you need it.

I’m cautious of adding subscription products i would depend on to my tools but if it’s something I definitely only need once a year I just buy a month of it.

Although $30/mo is a bit much for what it does. So if they did go one off presumably it would be about $500 a license.

It used to not be a subscription, and like that it would've definitely have been worth the money

+1 this, I bought it when it was a flat fee for a year of updates. That year's up now and I'd happily pay for another, but not as a subscription...

Uhm, but ScreenStufio is not available for Linux (or Windows for that matter)?

OpenStudio apparently is and I'm hyped.

> A $30/month subscription is indeed too much, but I see it as a one time payment for that month when I release something, then I pause the subscription. I need it rarely, very few videos need zooming and motion.

If I think something is worth the money, I typically don't need to actively decide to pause the subscription each time I use it.

Right, it’s not worth $30/month all year for me because I don’t use it past demo videos for when I publish a new app or large update. Which happens rarely.

But if I was that kind of user who did demos monthly, the time saved on one or two videos that month is worth $30.

The commenter you're replying to said he needs it only occasionally. It makes perfect sense to pause a subscription if you don't use it. Not doing so would be a waste of money. How can you critisise that, don't be ridiculous

I must be in the minority but I find that constant panning/zooming to be very distracting and almost dizzying. The sharp start of the easing curves is pretty awful too. I'm surprised people like it.

I'd probably do it with arrows or fading out parts of the screen instead.

A lot of the time it is, I agree. I would love the ability to do more highlighting and less panning. But in a small 700px wide video, zooming is kind of necessary to make it clear where the action is coming from. Because the app window is so large and packed.

And these recording editors don’t have arrows and callouts, not even a freeze frame. I have to plan the recording to the letter and after 10 frustrating takes I just say fk it and try to polish the least confusing take

Maybe I should start contributing to openscreen to get the ideal recording editor people are looking for instead of paying and complaining.

I used ScreenStudio for a year. Then, when my annual subscription was up for renewal I tried https://cap.so/ and https://screensage.pro/

After experiencing many bugs and UX oddities with both of those, I went back to ScreenStudio.

ScreenStudio is reliable and produces the best results for my use case (educational content and client updates)

I recently released QuickScreen give it a try for free https://www.appblit.com/quickscreen and one time purchase for $7.99 lifetime

The subscription model for an app I'm running on my desktop is taking the piss a bit. I'm fine paying for stuff I use, but I miss buying apps once and either using them as much as I want, or paying to upgrade.

Now I'm both locked in to paying every month, and can't keep using the app as it was when I bought it, because it auto updates and most apps will invariably have a server component that will quickly become incompatible with old app versions.

I hate the direction of "we'll force you to update even if you don't like the new direction, and we'll force you to pay for the privilege", so I'm voting with my wallet on this.

I created QuickScre because I wanted a no editing way of recording polished screen recordings for Slack etc. Free to try https://www.appblit.com/quickscreen

> Am I in the minority for thinking ScreenStudio is actually worth the money?

This is a classic question to every paid software. The answer is it depends.

Smart choice using PixiJS for the rendering pipeline — WebGL gives you hardware-accelerated compositing for the zoom/pan effects without needing to shell out to ffmpeg for every preview frame. The auto-zoom feature alone makes this worth it for anyone doing quick product demos where you'd otherwise spend 20 minutes keyframing in a full NLE. Would love to see cursor click highlighting land at some point, that's the one Screen Studio feature I actually miss.

pixijs has been great for my saas as well. rendering is blazing fast compared to ffmpeg pipelines.

Same, only praises; I used pixijs 10 years ago in a resource constrained mobile focused project and I keep using it today.

Curious how this compares to Recordly (https://recordly.dev)

It seems Recordly is a fork of OpenScreen with some native MacOS features. Interesting post here https://www.reddit.com/r/software/s/bAvNP3WjgT

I made this with OpenScreen: https://x.com/derekdfulton/status/2015804409205125151

Thought it came out pretty good

Looks smooth, but holy motion sickness.

Does this have any advantages over OBS Studio?

Speaking as someone who has used both: yes. OBS is a general-purpose recording/streaming system. It gives you a lot of flexibility, but it can take some work to make things look "nice."

Screen Studio (and so OpenScreen as well) are "opinionated" and are designed to create aesthetic videos with minimal configuration. They can't do a lot of the things that OBS can do, but if all you want is to record your desktop with a webcam overlay, it's a lot easier.

can it utilize my accelerator or GPU for best performance. and is it support kind of encode like av qucksync?

OBS is more focused on live-streaming, even if it can be general purpose.

OpenScreen is more about screen recording, once recorded it turns into a simple-ish NLE that is focused on editing screen-casts.

Yes. For me personally, I am only interested in creating short demo videos in as little time as possible. OBS is an advanced software that requires me to learn to use it.

I just downloaded this and had a zoom effect video from the first attempt. The learning curve is roughly zero.

It's the automatic zooming animations. I've not found any OBS scripts that can do this?

OBS + kdenlive can also get you here, but this product is meant to be purpose-built and time-saving specifically for the computer instructions use case

Also checkout https://screenix.studio/ if you're on Linux

I just tried Open Screen but it didn't work on my machine (Cachy OS) - it didn't detect the screen or my microphone. Hopefully it gets better

Great share, didn't know I wanted something like this until this thread. Thanks!

Looks great. Not FLOSS.

Nifty app!

Just tried the AppImage version on Linux, simple to use, and works Ok on my end.

Suggest you add preferences dropdown to floating bar, and ability to highlight parts of an area for record, ability to set the default save location or change it at will. Also noted that though I closed the app via the customary way, and removed the AppImage, the apps ICON remained present in GNOME's notification area.

Will keep an eye on its progress since OBS (what I used) seems to have stopped receiving updates :)

> OBS (what I used) seems to have stopped receiving updates :)

No it hasn't: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/commits/master/

Hmm, for the longest time, the Flatpak version of the app in my Linux OS was warning me that a particular older org.freedesktop.Platform runtime was end of life, and that OBS project should update their compatibility hence OBS was being classified as a security risk during the update process.

Having said that, and reading your reply, I stand corrected and I take it back as I did an update and the error is nowhere to be found. Not sure how the runtime was updated to the latest, 25.08, but assume it was the obs project.

Nice project. I thought of building exactly this.

Since it's much easier to port source code to other languages now, I'd love to see more projects like written in Swift, or C#.

I've been using this for the past month or so and have had nothing but positive experience. It's easy to use and works well. I wish the zoom was a slider instead of preset options, that way I could get finer control. Easily one of the best apps I found recently along with Handy.computer.

Thank you so much for making this. Screen studio was unbelievably expensive for what it was

For non AI era, putting efforts to make software like Screen Studio and charge $30 per month might have made sense. But with AI, burning credits for Open source will become a trend. Hail oss..

I see that this is for MacOS. Isn't there a stock feature for screen recording, like on the iPhone, or on Windows (snipping tool can do screen recordings since Windows 10 or 11)?

On Windows, I used to use https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Now, I see the last build is from 2022.

There is, using QuickTime. The repo just fails to mention the benefits of this by assuming everyone knows what Screen Studio is and does.

to be fair if you don't know about screen studio why are you looking at an oss alternative?

I don't know about screen studio, but if I were looking for a way to edit screen recordings I wouldn't be searching for an "open source alternative", I would be searching for "open source software"

Defining your project as an open source alternative to another program is a mistake I think

Fuck me for being interested in projects posted on HN, I guess.

Shift+Cmd+5 brings up the built-in screen capture tool, which includes options for recording the screen (or a window, or a section of the screen).

OpenScreen and its ilk seem to have more features for post-capture editing though.

Great project - but screen studio is actually pretty awesome!

This is really useful when it comes to recording product demo videos as well as UI is so clean and minimal that it feels like modern open source.

I'd rather have the metadata from click and typing events and use that to create a davinci project...

That's pretty cool!

Btw, it seems that "How trimming works" screen has some missing translations.

Genuinely impressed with this! Thank you!

Thanks to open source and AI, we don't need every software to be a subscription or an enshittified SaaS.

Screen Studio at $29/mo is unusually and extremely expensive for a video recorder app, and not counting the fact that it is proprietary, which means they can change pricing at any time.

Thanks for building this.

Yep. I've had ChatGPT build many simple python scripts or browser extensions that I can use for free instead of paying for subscriptions that shouldn't be subscriptions in the first place.

"OpenScreen is your free, open-source alternative to Screen Studio (sort of)."

If you rip something off, at least have the decency to not compare your product to it. I mean, why is it good to have zero revenue and at the same time killing revenue for something else, that existed for a long time?

What's wrong with people, why are they biting their own hand? FOSS is a trojan horse and look, how many borderline idiotic manchildren kill their livelihood and offer their arz on a platter and at the same time killing revenue streams for others. And for what? So someone could expropriate it in an instant???

I mean what on earth is wrong with people???

What the fuck?

To be clear - I didn't create this app, but I do think it's cool that good open source alternatives are emerging and felt like this might be interesting to the community

Now we need an open source self hostable Loom.

Haven’t tried it, but here is one: https://github.com/MarconLP/snapify

1. It says it is $8/month, which is not mentioned on the github page, so I had been thinking it was free in addition to being AGPL-3.0; it links to https://snapify.it/ which is where I see the fee.

2. It says "for everyone" but looks like it might be Linux-specific, and it doesn't say anything about which OSes are supported.

IIUC, the fee is just to use their instance, and hosting your own instance is actually free. Also, it looks like the client side of it runs in a browser, so it will support pretty much any OS.

Thanks for sharing! I'll give it a go and send back my feedback.

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