Full-featured recorder with live webcam overlay, AI background replacement, face blur, annotations, voice changer, and a fixed-text overlay — all in one free, open-source Electron app.
Every feature on this page is driven by code you can read, fork, and ship your own build of. Nothing is a black box. Nothing phones home. Nothing gets in the way.
The full source lives at github.com/ceasis/qnsub-screenrecorder. Single-repo TypeScript project: main process, preload bridges, and the React renderer all in one place. 51 unit tests. Clean typecheck. Build it yourself in under 3 minutes.
I'm building this in public. Updates, feature demos, and the occasional "why this took three attempts to get right" post-mortem ship on X / Twitter.
Every feature runs locally. No account, no cloud processing, no telemetry. Your recordings stay on your machine.
Capture a full display, a specific window, or drag a region. The webcam composites on top as a floating bubble in any of 8 shapes. One output MP4, hardware-encoded.
Blur your room or replace it with any image. Runs MediaPipe selfie segmentation or Robust Video Matting (RVM) on your GPU for hair-accurate edges. Auto-picks the best model your machine can handle.
Real-time pitch shifting via a Web Audio "Jungle" graph with Deep / High / Radio / Robot presets, or a custom pitch slider. Swaps live mid-recording without dropouts.
Hold Ctrl and drag anywhere on screen to draw arrows, lines, boxes, or highlights. Eight colors, outline / thickness presets, auto-fade so you don't need an undo.
Watermark, lower-third, or a permanent "LIVE" tag baked into every frame. Font picker, color palette, size slider, shadow / outline / glow effects, and a live preview with draggable position.
Tutorial-style zoom that smoothly follows your mouse. Dwell delay + follow speed sliders kill motion sickness — the camera only chases when you mean it.
Drop in any video and the app auto-detects every face, tracks them across frames, and lets you pick which to blur. Exports a clean MP4 with the audio preserved.
A floating sticky-note that only you can see — invisible to the screen recorder. Auto-docks beneath your face-cam bubble. Perfect for script notes and bullet points during recording.
Every model runs on-device — MediaPipe, RVM, and BlazeFace all inference locally. No uploads, no accounts, no analytics. The only network request is the optional one-time model download on first launch.
Windows installer is a one-click NSIS package. macOS users can build from source via npm run dist:mac.
QNSub Screen Recorder Setup X.Y.Z.exe.npm install && npm run dist:mac.Zero-config dev setup. You need Node 18+ and git. The whole build pipeline lives in package.json scripts.
git clone https://github.com/ceasis/qnsub-screenrecordercd qnsub-screenrecordernpm installnpm run dev — Vite + Electron with hot reload.npm run dist:win — Windows NSIS installer.npm run dist:mac — macOS DMG (must run on a Mac).out/. Each build auto-increments the patch version in package.json.npm test — run the vitest suite (51 tests covering the compositor math, tracker, and filters).It costs nothing, takes one click, and is the single biggest thing you can do to help. Stars drive GitHub's discovery algorithm — every extra star puts QNSub Studio in front of more people who need a free, open-source screen recorder. It's also the one metric the maintainer actually watches to decide how much time to pour into new features.
QNSub Studio is free and always will be. No paywall, no "unlock premium" screen, nothing held back. If it saved you time — or the cost of a screen-recorder subscription — a coffee tip keeps the updates coming and the maintainer caffeinated.
Prefer a custom amount? Open paypal.me/qnsub and type your own.
QNSub Studio is one of several tools built in public. If you like the way this one is put together, you may find something useful in the rest of the lineup.