How to record your screen

Screen recording used to mean installing something. It has not for several years — every current browser can capture a screen, a window or a tab natively, and the result never leaves your machine.

Your browser can already do it

The underlying capability is a web standard called getDisplayMedia, supported in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. When a page asks for it, the browser shows the picker — you choose an entire screen, a specific application window, or a single browser tab, and nothing is captured until you do.

That permission model is the important part. A page cannot start recording without you explicitly selecting a source in a dialog the page cannot control or fake.

The screen recorder uses this directly. The video is assembled in your browser and saved to your device; there is no upload and no server involved, which also means no file-size limit imposed by a service and no watermark.

Choosing the right source matters more than people expect. Capturing a single window keeps your other windows, notifications and desktop out of frame automatically. Capturing a tab is even tighter and is the only mode that can cleanly capture audio playing in that tab. Capture the whole screen only when you genuinely need to show switching between applications.

Getting the audio right

There are two entirely different audio sources and confusing them is the most common mistake.

System or tab audio is the sound the computer is producing — the video you are demonstrating, the notification chime. In Chrome and Edge this appears as a "Share tab audio" or "Share system audio" checkbox in the picker, and it is off by default. Miss it and your recording of a video is silent.

Microphone audio is you talking over it, and needs separate microphone permission.

Support varies awkwardly. Tab audio works well in Chromium browsers. Full system audio is limited on macOS at the operating-system level, and Firefox and Safari are more restricted than Chrome. If you need both narration and system sound reliably, Chrome or Edge on Windows is the path of least resistance.

Two practical points. Record narration in a soft room — soft furnishings, not a bare kitchen — because reverberation is close to impossible to remove afterwards. And do a ten-second test recording before the real one. Discovering the microphone was muted after a twenty-minute walkthrough is a specific kind of pain. If you only need audio, the voice recorder is simpler, and the webcam recorder handles talking-head video.

Resolution, frame rate and file size

The instinct is to record everything at maximum. It is usually the wrong call.

Resolution. Record at the resolution people will watch. 1080p is right for almost everything. 4K quadruples the file size, and if your viewer watches in a small embedded player it buys nothing. What matters more is that text is legible — if you are demonstrating an interface, increase the browser zoom before recording rather than the resolution afterwards.

Frame rate. Screen content is mostly static. 30 fps is plenty for a software demonstration and roughly halves the data of 60 fps. Reserve 60 for animation or gameplay.

Length. The single biggest lever on file size, and on whether anyone watches. Record the thing, not the preamble.

Close what you do not need before recording. Background applications cause dropped frames, and a dropped frame in a screen recording is very visible because the content is otherwise static.

WebM, MP4 and why the file is huge

Browser recording produces WebM, usually with the VP9 or VP8 codec. WebM is an open format, plays in every modern browser, and is what the MediaRecorder API supports most widely.

The friction is compatibility outside the browser. WebM plays fine on the web and in VLC, but some older video editors, some Windows applications and some messaging platforms expect MP4. If you need MP4, you need to re-encode, and doing that properly requires a real encoder — this is one of the few things a browser cannot do well.

On file size: browser recording prioritises reliability over compression, so the output is larger than a purpose-built encoder would produce. A few minutes of 1080p can run to a few hundred megabytes. Recording shorter, at 30 fps and 1080p, is the practical answer.

If the destination is a documentation page rather than a video player, consider whether you need video at all. A sequence of annotated screenshots is smaller, easier to skim, searchable and translatable. The image cropper and blur tool between them cover most of what a screenshot needs.

The checks worth doing before you record

Screen recordings leak more than almost any other medium, because they capture whatever happens to be on screen — including things you stopped noticing.

• Turn on Do Not Disturb. A message notification appearing mid-recording is the classic failure, and it shows the sender and often the message.
• Close other tabs. Tab titles are readable and revealing.
• Check the bookmarks bar, which frequently names internal tools and clients.
• Use a clean browser profile or a private window so autofill does not suggest real addresses and passwords into a form you are demonstrating.
• Use obviously fake test data. Never real customer names, real email addresses or real card numbers.
• Watch for the URL bar — session tokens and internal hostnames end up there.
• Check your desktop wallpaper and open folders if capturing a full screen.

Watch the recording back before sending it. And if something slipped through, blurring it is not always enough — a light blur or pixelation over text can sometimes be reversed. Cut the section or cover it with a solid block.

The built-in alternatives

Your operating system can do this too, and sometimes better.

On macOS, Shift+Command+5 opens a capture toolbar that records the screen or a selection, and it handles microphone audio. System audio needs additional software.

On Windows, Windows+G opens the Game Bar, which records applications despite the name, and Windows+Alt+R starts recording immediately. It cannot capture File Explorer or the desktop.

On iPhone and Android, screen recording is built into Control Centre and Quick Settings respectively.

Use the built-in tool when you want a local file and are not in a browser. Use the browser recorder when you want to capture a tab precisely, or when you are on a machine where you cannot install anything. Pikkit has the rest of the recording tools, and Images & Files collects them.