Capptivo

Capptivo is a free, open-source screen recording and video editing app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, built as an alternative to paid tools like Screen Studio and Cursorful. It combines a native recorder with a built-in editor so demos, tutorials, and product videos can be captured and polished without leaving the app. Released under the MIT license, it lets anyone use, modify, and redistribute the software freely.

Under the hood, Capptivo is built with Tauri, Rust, and React. Rust owns screen capture, encoding, and storage through native platform APIs: ScreenCaptureKit and VideoToolbox on macOS, Windows.Graphics.Capture on Windows, and xdg-desktop-portal with PipeWire on Linux. A 60 Hz cursor and click tracker records pointer motion alongside the video, while the React frontend stays purely presentational, communicating with Rust over typed IPC. Recorded footage is encoded through hardware-accelerated H.264 into crash-safe fragmented MP4, and projects are stored locally with no account required.

Key features include:

• Smart zoom — follow-cursor and click-based auto zoom fragments on an editable timeline
• Live annotations — pen, highlighter, shapes, and text drawn on screen while recording
• On-device captions — speech-to-text via whisper.cpp, no cloud processing required
• Face cam — customizable picture-in-picture webcam overlay synced with zoom
• Editor presets — save and reuse look, captions, cursor, and export settings
• Flexible export — MP4, WebM, and GIF output with quality and frame rate controls

Capptivo is fully local-first, storing projects in the OS app-data directory and requiring no cloud account. Third-party components such as the bundled FFmpeg sidecars carry their own separate GPL licensing, documented for anyone redistributing builds. With cross-platform installers published through GitHub Releases and an active open-source community welcoming contributions, it aims to replace expensive subscription screen recording software with a transparent, hackable alternative.