Native Screen

Polished screen recordings and product demos, made on your computer. Free and open source. Native on macOS and Windows.

Website · Download for Mac · Download for Windows · All releases

See it move on the website.

Why Native Screen

• A real multi-track timeline. Zooms, blur and spotlight masks, annotations, captions and keyboard shortcuts each get their own tracks, as many as you need. Overlap two blurs, stack caption lines, drag items between tracks, snap everything to edges and the playhead.
• Automatic polish. Zooms follow your clicks and typing, the cursor glides instead of shaking, and motion blur makes fast moves look filmed.
• Everything stays on your machine. Recording, captions, transcript editing, sensitive data detection and export all run locally. No account, no upload, no watermark.
• Native, not a web wrapper. SwiftUI, AppKit and Metal on macOS, WinUI 3 and Direct3D 11 on Windows, with the system's own windows, menus and shortcuts. Hardware encoding, no FFmpeg, and no CPU use while the editor sits still.
• Let an AI agent do the editing. Claude, Codex, Cursor and other MCP clients can record, edit, restyle and export through the app. Every change lands in the editor you see and can be undone.
• Light and dark, and 15 languages: English, العربية, Čeština, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Русский, Türkçe, Tiếng Việt, 简体中文 and 繁體中文.

Features

Record

• Whole display, one window or a selected area, at native resolution and up to 60 fps.
• Camera, microphone and system audio as separate tracks. Pause and resume.
• Camera only: record just yourself, with a framed preview before you start.
• Draw on the screen while recording: pen, highlighter, arrows and boxes. Every stroke becomes an annotation you can edit afterwards.
• Speaker notes that only you can see, kept out of the recording.
• Recording profiles to save a setup and come back to it.
• Crash safe: the recording is written in small pieces, so a lost take can be recovered.

Edit

• Cut, trim, speed up and merge clips. Typing bursts are found for you and can be sped up in one click.
• Zoom track with automatic and manual zooms, or a loupe that magnifies one spot.
• Blur and spotlight masks on as many tracks as you need, plus automatic detection of emails, keys and faces.
• Keyboard shortcuts shown as 3D keycaps on their own tracks.
• Annotations: text, arrows, shapes, images and pen strokes that draw themselves in, with layers you can reorder.
• Wallpapers, gradients, padding, shadows, device frames, crop, and aspect ratios for every platform with safe zones for Reels, TikTok and Shorts.
• Camera layouts, styles and background removal, with AI or a green screen.
• Camera-only videos: framed, full frame or a cutout of you, with the same backgrounds and stickers, kept centered on your face. Vertical in one click.
• Custom cursors.
• Undo everything. Presets to reuse a look across projects.

Captions and transcript

• On-device captions with line or word animation and per-caption styles.
• Edit by transcript: remove filler words and tighten pauses in one pass, or cut a sentence by deleting its words.
• Export captions as .srt.

Export

• MP4, ProRes and GIF, 720p to 4K, hardware accelerated.
• Quick export to a file or straight to the clipboard, still frames as PNG or JPEG.

Install

	Requirement	Download
macOS	macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon or Intel	NativeScreen.dmg
Windows	Windows 10 or 11, x64	Microsoft Store or NativeScreen-win-Setup.exe

macOS. Open the DMG and drag Native Screen to Applications. The app is signed and notarized by Apple. On first launch macOS asks for Screen Recording permission, and for camera and microphone when you turn them on. Updates arrive inside the app (Native Screen > Check for Updates...).

Windows. The Microsoft Store version is signed and kept up to date by the Store, so it installs without a warning. The installer from GitHub is the same app. Signing certificates cost money every year, and Native Screen is free and open source, so the installer is not code signed yet. We will look for a way to improve this. For now Windows SmartScreen shows a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway. You can check the download against the SHA-256 shown on the release page. Updates install themselves after that.

Permissions

What Native Screen asks for on Windows, and why. Everything it records stays on your PC.

Permission	Why
Full trust desktop app	It is a regular Windows app: Windows.Graphics.Capture records the screen, WASAPI loopback records system audio and Media Foundation encodes the video.
Screen capture without the yellow border	So the border Windows draws around a captured window or screen does not end up in your recording. You always start a recording yourself, with a countdown, and the recording bar stays visible.
Microphone	Only when you turn the microphone on in the recording bar.
Camera	Only when you turn the camera on in the recording bar.
Keyboard and mouse hooks	Only while recording: pointer positions, clicks and pressed keys, for automatic zoom, click effects and shortcut keycaps. Saved in the project folder, never sent anywhere.
Internet	Downloads the on-device models for captions and background removal from Hugging Face when you use those features. The GitHub build also checks GitHub for updates (the Microsoft Store build is updated by the Store).

No account, no ads, no analytics.

Let an AI agent drive it

Turn on Settings > AI Agents in Native Screen. The page shows the exact command for your machine, for example:

claude mcp add nativescreen -- "/Applications/Native Screen.app/Contents/MacOS/Native Screen" --mcp

Then ask things like "record my browser window for 20 seconds, zoom in on every click, add captions and export a 1080p MP4". The agent talks to the running app over a local socket that only your user account can open.

Build from source

macOS: Xcode 27 or later.

open macos/NativeScreen.xcodeproj

Run the NativeScreen scheme. Local builds have no updater, so they never replace themselves with a release.

Windows: .NET 10 SDK and the Windows App SDK workload, on Windows 10 or 11.

dotnet run --project windows/src/NativeScreen.App -c Debug -p:Platform=x64

pwsh windows/scripts/verify.ps1 builds everything and runs the tests.

Repository

Path	What is there
macos/	macOS app (SwiftUI, Metal, ScreenCaptureKit)
windows/	Windows app (WinUI 3, Direct3D 11, Media Foundation)
spec/	File format, rendering math, engineering decisions and the feature checklist
conformance/	Reference projects and frames both apps must match
site/	The website
docs/releasing.md	How releases are built, signed and published

Projects are folders (.nativescreen) with a documented JSON format (spec/02), so the same project opens on both platforms.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Read AGENTS.md and the relevant part of spec/ first: behavior is specified there before it is written.

Credits

• Stickers are Noto Emoji artwork (Apache License 2.0).
• Camera background photos come from Pexels and Pixabay, under the Pexels license and the Pixabay Content License. They are not covered by the MIT license below.

License

MIT © Duc Trung Mai