Cap

Overview

Cap is a place to record, keep and share screen recordings. Record straight from this page in your browser, or from Cap's desktop app, and you get a link to send. The person you send it to just watches in their browser, with no account and no app. Comments, reactions and view counts come back to you here.

Features

• Record your screen in the browser, with your camera and microphone
• Or record with the Cap desktop app, which does more and records better
• Import a video file you already have
• A private library of your recordings, with folders and search
• Share links you can set to public, password protected, or private
• Comments and emoji reactions on a recording, timed to the moment
• An embed player, so a recording drops into any page you write
• Transcripts and captions, plus AI titles, summaries and chapters, when you add a key
• Who watched, how much they watched, and when
• Spaces, so a team can share a recording library
• moose provisions and manages the database Cap needs, so there is nothing to wire up

Setting up

Sign-in sends a six digit code to your email, so this app asks for an email sending key before it will install. See below.

Once you are in, open Record a Cap and pick how you want to record:

• Record in Browser works right away. Your browser asks which screen or window to share.
• Open Cap Desktop uses the desktop app, which records at higher quality and can edit. Install it from cap.so (macOS, Windows, phone, and a Chrome extension; there is no Linux desktop app), then open its Settings and set the Cap Server URL to this app's address.

The first account to sign in becomes the owner.

Good to know

• You need an email sending account, and it is not optional. Cap signs you in by emailing a code, and it sends that mail through Resend's API rather than a mail server, so moose cannot send it for you. You paste a Resend key and a sending domain in at install. Resend has to verify that domain before it will send, so you do need a domain of your own.
• You can add Google sign-in as well, once you are in. Fill in the Google fields on this app's settings, then add this app's address plus /api/auth/callback/google as an allowed redirect in your Google Cloud project. The email code path keeps working either way.
• Anyone with a share link can watch, by design. Sending a recording to someone outside your box is the whole point, so the share and player addresses answer without the box login. Cap decides per recording whether that link works: new recordings are private, and you turn each one public or put a password on it yourself.
• Transcripts and AI need your own keys. Transcription runs through AssemblyAI, and titles, summaries, chapters and translation run through a model provider you choose. You add the keys on this app's settings and the provider bills you directly. Recording, uploading, sharing and comments cost nothing and use no key.
• Custom domains do not work here. Cap offers a setting for putting your own domain in front of share links, and it is built on one hosting vendor's API that a self-hosted copy cannot reach. Your recordings are already on your own address, so nothing is missing; the setting just fails if you try it.
• This is a heavy app. It runs a web tier, a video processing service with FFmpeg, and an object store, alongside moose's managed database. Recordings are video, so the disk grows fast with use.