Screen Recorder

How to record your screen

1. Pick a Format, a Quality and a Frame rate. The defaults (the first format, High (5 Mbit/s), 30 fps) suit most tutorials and demos.
2. Tick Record my microphone if you want to narrate. Keep Include tab or system audio ticked to capture the sound of a video, a call or a game.
3. Press Start recording. Your browser opens its own dialog: choose an entire screen, a window or a browser tab, and enable the audio switch there if you want its sound.
4. The timer and the red dot show that recording is running. Use Pause and Resume to leave out a part, and press Stop when you are done. Clicking “Stop sharing” in the browser bar also ends the recording and keeps what was captured.
5. Watch the result in the preview, check the Duration, File size and Resolution, then press Download. Delete recording throws it away.

Formats and quality

WebM (VP9) gives the best quality for its size in Chrome, Edge and Firefox. WebM (VP8) is older and a little bigger, but plays almost everywhere. MP4 (H.264) is listed when your browser can record it (Safari, and recent versions of Chrome and Edge); it is the easiest choice to open on a phone, in iMovie or in PowerPoint. The list only shows what your browser can really produce, so the options differ between browsers. Browser default appears when the browser doesn’t say which formats it supports.

Quality is the target video bitrate. At 5 Mbit/s a minute of video takes about 38 MB; at 2.5 Mbit/s about half that. Screens with little motion (slides, code, documents) usually end up smaller than the target, because the encoder only spends bits on what changes. Choose 60 fps for games and fast scrolling, and 30 fps for everything else: it halves the work of the encoder.

WebM files made by browsers often don’t store their total duration, so some players show an unknown length or seek slowly. VLC and every modern browser play them fine. To edit or share them widely, convert the file to MP4 with a video converter.

Sound: screen, tab and microphone

Which sound can be captured depends on your system and browser. Chrome and Edge can record the sound of a tab everywhere, and the sound of the whole screen on Windows and ChromeOS. macOS doesn’t give web pages the system sound, so share a tab if you need a video’s audio there. When both a shared sound and your microphone are selected, this tool mixes them into one track in the browser with the Web Audio API. If the microphone can’t be opened, recording still starts, without your voice.

Wear headphones while narrating over sound from your speakers, otherwise the microphone records it a second time with a small echo.

Phones and tablets

Mobile browsers (Chrome for Android, Safari on iPhone and iPad) don’t let web pages capture the screen, so this tool shows a message instead. Use the screen recorder built into the phone: the Control Centre on iOS, the quick settings panel on Android.