Launched this week
Capptivo
Free open-source screen recorder & demo editor
502 followers
Free open-source screen recorder & demo editor
502 followers
Capptivo is a free, open-source screen recorder and demo editor for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Record locally, add follow-cursor zooms, polish the look, burn on-device captions, and export, no account, no subscription. Give your demos the spotlight they deserve.
Love that captions are burned on-device, keeping demos private while still looking polished is a smart touch.
Capptivo
@ilko_kacharov Thanks! Really appreciate that. Privacy mattered a lot to me for screen demos, so burning captions on-device felt like the right call and it also removes the cost of cloud processing or tokens. Hope it works well for you!
Open-source cross-platform screen recorders exist, OBS being the obvious one, and demo-specific tools like Loom and Tella own the polished-output segment. What's Capptivo's actual target user, someone who finds OBS too complex and Loom too subscription-heavy, and if so what's the specific feature or workflow that makes Capptivo a better fit for that person than something like Kap or Rottenwood which also target simpler Mac recording?
Good timing — I just skipped the video/demo field on my own Product Hunt draft because I didn't have a clean way to record one without a subscription tool. The click-based auto-zoom and local processing (no cloud upload for an unreleased product) are exactly what I'd want for a quick product demo. Does the caption burning work well with narration you record separately, or is it built around live mic capture during the recording itself?
Since everything is local with no account, the thing I'd want to know before trusting it with a long demo: if the app crashes or the machine sleeps mid-recording, is there any autosave of what's already captured, or does a crash lose the whole take? That's usually the moment people switch tools permanently, right after losing twenty minutes of a good recording.
MIT-licensing this after building it solo for your own workflow is a solid move, way better than watching people pay $29/month for something this scoped.
Capptivo
@irahimiam Thank you, I really appreciate that!
I originally built Capptivo to solve my own workflow, and over time I kept adding features I genuinely needed, like Epic Pen-style annotations while recording etc. I use it every day, and because it's built with Rust and Tauri, it's lightweight, fast, and cross-platform.
At some point, I realized it was just sitting in my private GitHub repository when it could actually help students, teachers, creators, and anyone who can't justify paying $29/month for a screen recorder.
I believe Capptivo has a lot of potential, and with the help of the open-source community, it can grow into one of the best tools for creating demos and tutorials, while offering features that many paid products still don't have.
Wish I saw this yesterday while recording my demo video :(. Incredible work!
Capptivo
@amronos Thank you! I really appreciate it.
on-device captions plus no signup wall on export is a combo that basically doesn't exist in this category right now.
Capptivo
@alex_watson2110 Thank you, I really appreciate it.
@idboussadel the no account bit only really holds if nothing leaves the machine, so im curious, does the speech model actually ship inside the app itself?
Capptivo
@alex_watson2110 Captions run fully on-device, your audio never gets uploaded for transcription. Capptivo uses Whisper via whisper.cpp on your computer. The speech model isn’t baked into the app download; it’s a one-time download you trigger from the Captions panel, then it stays on your machine.