Let's say you're fed up of the state of screen recorders' paywalls and limitations and want to go on coding your own - it turns out you can already have basic functionnalities in a few lines of code.
We can ask the browser to get the capture video stream for us using the screen capture API, but for security reasons we must ensure a user gesture triggered the capture, for example a button click:
const button = document.createElement("button");
button.innerHTML = "capture";
document.body.append(button);
button.addEventListener("click", async () => {
// TODO
});
On click, get the video stream and record it
const stream = await navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia();
const recoder = new MediaRecorder(stream);
recoder.start();
Stop the recording when the user stops sharing the screen
const [video] = stream.getVideoTracks();
video.addEventListener("ended", () => {
recoder.stop();
});
Obtain the recorded file and download it
recoder.addEventListener("dataavailable", (evt) => {
const a = document.createElement("a");
a.href = URL.createObjectURL(evt.data);
a.download = "capture.webm";
a.click();
});
And voilà, you have a simple screen recorder!
It has many limitations that would be fun to resolve - audio recording, webcam integration, long running streams, etc - but I just found that doing such a powerful thing already with so few lines of code was too awesome not to share.
Top comments (14)
Heyo! Wonderful post here. 🙌
Just a heads up that you can embed CodePens here on DEV if you wanna.
To do so, you just use this syntax:
{% codepen https://codepen.io/ninofiliu/embed/BaMzxQM %}You definitely don't have to do this, but just letting you know if you'd like to.
Notably, CodePen embeds behave a bit differently than most embeds on DEV (GitHub, YouTube, internal DEV embeds) which use a simplified syntax, for example:
{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&ab_channel=RickAstley %}Hope this is helpful to ya and thanks for sharing such a helpful post here on DEV!
WebCodecs is even more interesting new Api. Just implemented live video converter from the camera and screen capture, still some experimental functions but works perfectly in the modern Chrome, webworkers.
Yes! Webcodecs is amazing. I'm rewriting supermosh.github.io so as to use web codecs atm!
Wow, nice. Can I know more about the project?
Oh interesting, wasn't aware that it was this simple.
You learn something new every day. Thanks for this post, I am sure I will make this in use on somewhere, some day.
Please consult the browser support before using it. Great article!
I did :) both the recorder APIs and the screen capture APIs are in full support :)
I was talking about the others, so they might want to try it out on a different browser and to be surprised when it's not working :)
Nice read and cool idea. Looks like a very handy API
Incredible how many APIs browsers have to implement. I guess many browsers rely on chromium for all/most-of these APIs? I wonder if new browsers like arc and vivaldi do that too
Thank you for sharing this informative and well-written post, Nino! This article on creating a screen recorder with JavaScript is impressive!
Wow, great project idea. I'm not able to find the download link
Thank you for sharing with us with this information