Beam

A Screen Recorder for clear, polished product demo, similar to Recordly or ScreenStudio.

Download Beam for Windows, macOS, or Linux · Join Beam on Discord

🎥 Demo

BeamDemo.webm

📸 Screenshots

🚀 Features

Capture

• 🖥️ Display, Window, or Custom Crop Record your full screen, a specific app window, or select any area you want to capture.
• 🎙️ Separate Audio Tracks Capture your microphone and system audio at the same time, each on its own track for easier editing.
• 🎥 Webcam Overlay Add your camera on top of the recording, move it anywhere on screen, and customize its size and shape.
• 📖 Floating Teleprompter Keep your script visible while recording with a lightweight transparent teleprompter that stays out of the final capture.

Editing & Styling

• 🔍 Smart Zooms Automatically zoom in around clicks and keyboard actions, or add your own zooms with keyframes.
• 🖱️ Cursor Smoothing & Styling Get clean, fluid cursor movement with native high-precision tracking. Adjust the size, swap the cursor style, add click effects, or smooth out shaky movement.
• 📝 Local AI Captions Generate subtitles directly on your device using Whisper. No cloud uploads, API keys, or extra subscriptions.
• 🎨 Canvas Backdrops Give your recordings a polished look with backgrounds, gradients, padding, shadows, and rounded window corners.
• ⏱️ Multi-Track Timeline Edit video, audio, and subtitles independently with precise scrubbing, snapping, and non-destructive editing.

Performance & Export

• 🦀 Rust Capture Engine A lightweight native capture engine built for smooth 60 fps recording without putting unnecessary load on your CPU or GPU.
• 📦 Direct Export Export straight to MP4 or WebM, up to 4K, with simple bitrate presets and fast rendering.

Screenshot exports use the same destination workflow as video: name the file, choose PNG or WebP in the animated format group, then select a recent folder or choose a new one. The chosen export folder is shared between both editors. Popover backdrops remain outside their scroll viewport, so short menus do not reserve a scrollbar and overflowing menus keep their blur.

See GPU drivers and WebCodecs export for hardware prerequisites, installation guidance and verified platform limits.

Have ideas or feature requests? Open an issue or join the discussion on Discord.

🌍 Availability

Beam is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

🪟 Windows

• Distributed as a native Windows installer.
• Screen, window, region, camera, microphone, and system-audio recording are supported.
• Overlay positions and sizes can be saved and restored.

🍏 macOS

• Distributed as a DMG for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 13 or newer.
• Screen Recording, Microphone, and Camera permissions must be granted when those sources are used.
• Overlay positions and sizes can be saved and restored.

[!NOTE] "Beam is damaged and cannot be opened"

After moving Beam into /Applications, remove the macOS quarantine flag in Terminal:

xattr -cr /Applications/Beam.app

Alternatively, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, and click Open Anyway.

🐧 Linux

• Distributed as AppImage, DEB, and RPM packages.
• Screen and window capture uses XDG Desktop Portal, PipeWire, and FFmpeg. The system picker requests explicit permission when a capture starts.
• Recording click and keyboard-shortcut metadata requires explicit Polkit consent.
• On X11, overlay positions and sizes can be saved and restored.
• On native Wayland, overlay sizes can be saved, but positions cannot. Wayland prevents applications from reading global window coordinates, so Electron reports x: 0, y: 0 and Beam cannot restore the camera overlay or teleprompter position.
• Beam does not force XWayland as a workaround because it can be incompatible with some GPU and X11 configurations.

🌐 Supported Languages

The interface is available in 15 languages:

• 🇺🇸 English
• 🇫🇷 Français
• 🇪🇸 Español
• 🇩🇪 Deutsch
• 🇷🇺 Русский
• 🇧🇬 Български
• 🇨🇳 简体中文
• 🇰🇷 한국어
• 🇧🇷 Português (Brasil)
• 🇯🇵 日本語
• 🇮🇹 Italiano
• 🇵🇱 Polski
• 🇹🇼 繁體中文
• 🇮🇳 हिन्दी
• 🇻🇳 Tiếng Việt

🛠️ Developer documentation

Run bun run dev to start Vite and Electron in one terminal. Each worktree gets its own persistent development session and an available renderer port. All sessions reuse your existing projects, screenshots and preferences in Videos/Beam/user/. Use bun run dev --session preview for another isolated Electron profile in the same worktree, or bun run dev --force-no-rust to use the verified prebuilt capture engine. Ctrl+C stops the session.

If you want to run Beam locally or contribute to the project, start with the guide for your platform:

• 📖 Contributing Guide
• 🪟 Windows development
• 🍏 macOS development
• 🐧 Linux development

The repository's engineering guidelines are linked from each guide.

Beam's framework-independent engine provides the same document commands, immutable history and identified JSON transactions to application code, CLI tools and agent adapters. See the shared authoring protocol and architecture.

The packaged application includes beam-cli (beam-cli.cmd on Windows); Linux also accepts beam --cli. In development, use bun run beam. Commands support creating video/image documents, editing, JSON-lines transactions, native capture, frame extraction, HTML/Vue motion and MP4/WebM/PNG/WebP export. Codecs and GPU rendering use an explicit Chromium backend; install it with beam-cli browser install or configure BEAM_CHROMIUM_EXECUTABLE.

Video export accepts beam-cli export request.json output.mp4 --backend webcodecs (default), or --backend ffmpeg-vaapi for experimental Linux GPU export. Both use Beam's common renderer. FFmpeg requires a working X11/XWayland display, VA-API drivers and built native artifacts; see setup and CLI usage.

For AI agents, start with beam-cli skills install, then use skills check and skills update to keep the Beam guidance current. The pack includes ten skills for design briefs, HTML composition, deterministic animation, recording, screenshots, video editing, assets/fonts, audio and export. Skills are fetched from this repository's .skills/Beam-cli directory and installed project-locally by default; use --global, --agent claude|cursor|gemini, or --dir to choose another destination. Local edits are protected. See the skills guide, also bundled as beam-cli docs skills, for version pinning, backups and local/offline installs.

💬 Join the Beam community

Have feedback, ideas, or questions? Join the Beam community on Discord and follow the project on GitHub.

Join Beam on Discord · Beam on GitHub

💖 Acknowledgements

Beam takes inspiration from Recordly. Some ideas are inspired by it; Beam is not a fork, it is a complete rewrite.

Beam's source code is released under MPL-2.0. See Beam licensing for commercial use, forks, third-party material and earlier MIT versions. The planned Desktop Pro policy covers subscriptions and future paid features and cloud services; it does not introduce an activation system or change current Free features.