Screen Capture for Mac Free

See it in action

This demo was recorded with the app itself — you're watching Screen Capture do its own product video.

What it does

Pick your screen, pick what sound to record, press Start Recording. When you press Stop, the finished MP4 is sitting in your Movies folder and the Preview button lights up to play it back.

• Record your voice and the computer's sound together — narrate over a YouTube video, a game, or a call, and both end up mixed in one file. Most free recorders make you pick one or the other.
• Or just one of them — plain-language choices: voice only, computer sound only, or both. No audio-device jargon to decode.
• Hear it while you record — live monitoring keeps the sound playing through your speakers during the recording, like OBS does.
• Full Retina resolution — captures your screen at its native pixel density, so text and UI stay razor sharp instead of turning to mush.
• Three quality presets plus an FPS control, encoded in hardware with the Apple VideoToolbox H.264 encoder, so recording stays light on your CPU.
• Everything stays local. Recordings are written straight to a folder you choose. Nothing touches the network.

It comes from the same workshop as FFmpeg Commander, my paid video toolbox. Screen recording used to be a feature inside it, but it deserved to be its own small, free tool. So here it is.

Doesn't the Mac already have a screen recorder?

It does — Cmd+Shift+5 and QuickTime. And here's their catch: they can't record the computer's sound. Try recording a YouTube video or a game with the built-in tool and play it back — the picture is there, the audio isn't. Apple's recorder only captures the microphone.

That gap is exactly what this app fills. Record the computer's sound, your voice, or both mixed together in one file — the thing the built-in recorder has never done. If all you need is silent video of your screen, honestly, Cmd+Shift+5 is fine. The moment sound matters, you need something more.

Why recordings look sharper than OBS out of the box

If you've recorded your Mac's screen with OBS Studio and wondered why the text looks soft no matter what you tweak, here's the usual reason: OBS defaults to a 1920x1080 canvas. On a Retina Mac that means your screen gets scaled down before it's ever encoded, and scaled-down text is exactly what makes screen recordings look blurry.

Screen Capture records at your display's native Retina resolution, and its quality presets use bitrates picked for screen content, not streaming budgets. Full-resolution source plus enough bitrate is the whole trick. OBS can be configured to do the same if you know which settings to dig for — this app just does it by default, with nothing to configure.

It's light, too. There's no compositing canvas, no live preview rendering, no plugin runtime — the capture goes straight into Apple's hardware encoder. In our testing, recording a full Retina display at 30 fps with both audio tracks used about a quarter of one CPU core on an Apple Silicon MacBook Air. The whole app is a 50 MB download.

OBS is a fantastic tool for streaming and multi-source production. If all you want is a clean, sharp recording of your screen and your voice, that's the job this app was built for.

Installing it

The app is fully self-contained. FFmpeg, the audio tools, everything it needs is packed inside the single app bundle. There is no installer and no extra downloads for the standard setup.

1. Download the ZIP above and double-click it to unpack Screen Capture.app.
2. Drag the app to your Applications folder (or run it from anywhere, it doesn't care).
3. First launch: right-click the app and choose "Open", then confirm. You only do this once.

The permissions macOS will ask for

Screen recording is one of the most protected things an app can do on a Mac, so macOS makes you approve it explicitly. This is normal and it happens with every screen recorder, OBS and Zoom included.

Screen Recording permission

1. The first time you press Start Recording, macOS shows a prompt saying the app would like to record the screen. Click Open System Settings.
2. In Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, turn on the toggle next to Screen Capture.
3. Quit the app completely and open it again. macOS only applies this permission on the next launch. This is the step everyone misses.

Microphone permission

When you record with your voice, macOS asks for microphone access with a simple Allow button. Click Allow and you're set. This one works immediately, no relaunch needed.

Recording system audio Optional

Out of the box the app records your screen and your voice. If you also want to capture the sound your Mac itself is playing, that takes one extra free piece: BlackHole, a virtual audio driver. macOS does not let any app tap the system's audio output directly, so every screen recorder that captures system sound uses a driver like this one.

1. Download the free BlackHole 2ch installer from existential.audio/blackhole and run it. It needs your admin password because it installs a system audio driver.
2. Open Screen Capture and pick BlackHole 2ch in the Audio dropdown.
3. Record. The app routes your Mac's sound through BlackHole automatically while recording and switches your speakers back when you stop. You don't have to touch your sound settings at all.

The app's dependency panel shows whether BlackHole is detected, and the ? button next to the Audio dropdown repeats these instructions right inside the app.

Under the hood: FFmpeg

The recording engine inside this app is FFmpeg — the open-source workhorse that powers video processing across the entire industry, from streaming services to broadcast. It's bundled inside the app, so there's nothing extra to install; you just get an engine with two decades of hardening behind it doing the capture and encoding.

It's also the same engine behind FFmpeg Commander, my full video toolbox. This recorder uses a small slice of what FFmpeg can do — the big tool opens up the rest: converting, compressing, subtitling, downloading, all of it.

Requirements

• A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)
• A recent version of macOS
• About 150 MB of disk space for the app

Recordings default to your Movies folder and you can point them anywhere you like.

Want to edit what you recorded?

Screen Capture records. It doesn't trim, convert, compress, add music, or burn in subtitles, and it never will. That job belongs to FFmpeg Commander, the full video toolbox this app was born from. Cut out the dead air, convert for the web, transcribe the audio with Whisper AI, all on your own machine. Take a look if that sounds useful.