Show HN: I made a web-based, free alternative to Screen Studio

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I know people are going on about privacy and that's fair but easily sorted with the appropriate data privacy policies and actually adhering to your commitments in them.

If you are approaching this from a potential business perspective that will not be the major issue. As you can tell from the comments most people do want their screen recordings on a remote service, now matter the policies involved.

That leaves you with some options :

1) Encrypt the outgoing WebRTC stream before it leaves the client device/browser (e.g. through WebRTC Insertable Streams or similar), encoded with a client local key that only your customer knows/manages. This ensures any screen recordings stored on your end cannot be accessed in any way. They can then download the recordings as needed and decrypt on demand. Note that this still has the implication of you storing and transmitting massive amounts of data which is likely to become cost prohibitive as a service.

2) As above but do the decrypting for your customer on your end so they get to download playable media. This obviously introduces the security risk of your platform becoming temporarily able to 'see' the content.

3) Save your recording directly through MediaRecorder WebM or similar (has various browser compatibility challenges as standards materialize) and uses less obvious encodings (we're still living with the bullshit of H.264 requiring licensing).

System audio (i.e. Zoom calls) can be captured only on Chromium browsers on Windows and ChromeOS when sharing the entire screen; tab audio has wider OS support; Safari and Firefox do not support system or tab audio capture https://addpipe.com/docs/recording-client/screen-recording/#...

The MDN support table does not differentiate in this regard. (le: it actually does if you click to see the implementation notes)

Nice. https://gifcap.dev is good also.

I love this tool, but I am pessimistic because the following is probably going to happen next:

1. At some point, the app will be covered with tonloads of ads to the point of impossibility to use

2. The core functionality will be hid behind sign-up/sign-in walls. The email addresses will be collected and then spammed to the brim

3. To add an insult to the injury, the app features will be gradually crippled unless you switch to a "Pro" plan. But you will not be able to do that efficiently as a user because you will be constantly attacked, bombarded and poisoned by ad banners and popups everywhere

4. Then, the app will start to upsell other offerings (of course, with modal banners!)

Those are cynical observations but they are 99% precise. I wish you good luck if you are among 1% elite.