Screen Recorder

Screen capture is a browser feature, so what you can record depends on the browser more than on this page. This is what to expect on a computer:

• Chrome and Edge (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS): entire screen, a single window or a browser tab. A tab can be recorded with its sound: tick Also share tab audio in the dialog. On Windows, choosing Entire screen also offers Share system audio, which records everything you hear.
• Firefox: screen or window, but no computer sound. Your microphone still works.
• Safari on a Mac: screen or window, no computer sound. Depending on the Safari version, the recording comes out as WebM or directly as MP4.

If you tick Computer sound but the browser hands over no audio, the page tells you right after you start, so you don't find out at the end of a 20 minute tutorial.

Safari on iPhone and iPad and Chrome on Android don't give web pages access to the screen. When this page is opened in one of them, it shows a short notice instead of a record button. Both systems have a recorder built in:

• iPhone and iPad: open Control Center and tap the Screen Recording button. If it isn't there, add it in Settings, Control Center. Press and hold the button to turn the microphone on.
• Android: swipe down from the top of the screen twice and tap Screen record (called Screen recorder on Samsung phones). You may need to edit the Quick Settings panel to add it.

Phone recordings are usually large and in portrait. Afterwards you can cut them with Trim Video, reframe them with Crop Video or make them smaller with Compress Video.

The two settings cap how much data the browser may use per second:

• Standard: 30 frames per second, video capped at 2.5 Mbps. That is at most about 19 MB per minute for the picture, plus about 1 MB per minute for sound at 128 kbps.
• Smooth: 60 frames per second, video capped at 8 Mbps, so at most about 60 MB per minute plus sound.

These are ceilings, not averages. The browser only spends data on parts of the screen that change. In our tests a 35 second recording of a mostly still 1280×720 screen at Standard came to 1.5 to 2.0 MB, about a tenth of the ceiling. Full-screen video or fast scrolling gets much closer to it.

Pick Smooth only when motion matters. For a slide deck or a form walkthrough, 60 fps doubles the frames without making text any sharper. Text sharpness comes from your screen resolution, which is recorded as it is.

Chrome, Edge and Firefox record WebM (VP8 video and Opus sound). WebM plays in those browsers and in VLC, and YouTube, Google Drive and most learning platforms accept it as it is. Choose Convert to MP4 when the file is going to an iPhone, PowerPoint, Keynote, an older video editor or a messaging app that only previews MP4.

Conversion re-encodes the picture as H.264 at the recording's own size and keeps the sound. It runs in your browser too. On our test machine, a cloud server with no graphics card, a 35 second 1280×720 recording converted in 6.5 seconds with the browser's built-in encoder. Where the browser can't encode H.264, the page uses FFmpeg instead (a one-time download of about 10 MB), which took 44.6 seconds for the same file. On a normal laptop with hardware video encoding, the first path is the one that runs.

After you stop, the page also rewrites the WebM's index without re-encoding, so players can show the length and you can seek in it. Raw browser recordings often lack that.

• The recording is black on a Mac. macOS needs permission: open System Settings, Privacy & Security, Screen & System Audio Recording, turn on your browser, then quit and reopen it.
• No computer sound. Record a tab and tick the tab audio box, or on Windows choose Entire screen and tick Share system audio. Firefox and Safari can't capture it.
• My voice is missing. The browser blocked the microphone. Click the icon at the left of the address bar, allow the microphone and record again.
• It stopped by itself. Closing the shared tab or window ends the capture, and the page saves what was recorded up to that point.
• Very long recordings. The recording is held in the tab's memory until you download it. An hour at Standard can reach about 1.2 GB in the worst case, so for long sessions keep other heavy tabs closed and download straight away.

Recording, previewing and converting all happen inside your browser tab. No part of the recording is sent to UtilityNest or anyone else, and nothing is stored after you close the tab. That makes it safe for recording internal dashboards, client work or anything with personal data on screen. Remember that the recording captures whatever is visible, including notifications, so turn on Do Not Disturb first.