Why I Built This
When recording walkthroughs or demos, I usually want my screen and camera feed together, with a teleprompter nearby so I can follow my script. I initially explored building a Cameo-like experience in the browser before creating a native macOS app, which led to TD Capture. It is a lightweight native macOS screen recording tool focused on screen capture, camera overlay, and teleprompter workflows, exporting directly to local MP4.
Screen and Camera Setup
The app supports recording the full screen or capturing a single window. Camera video and microphone audio are combined into an MP4 file (H.264 and AAC), outputting at a maximum of 1080p with a 30fps target.
The camera overlay comes in circular and rounded-rectangle styles, with adjustable sizing, mirroring, background blur, and three background image presets. Background segmentation may not be perfect. You can drag the floating window across the screen; when recording a single window, corner presets are recommended because dragging uses display-relative coordinates.
Teleprompter and Script Library
The app includes a scrollable teleprompter whose text can be edited directly in the floating overlay. The teleprompter is only there to assist your reading during recording and is excluded from the final exported video.
The script library lets you paste text manually or import local TXT and Markdown files. The app also bundles a local stdio MCP server, letting clients create and update local scripts directly. The interface supports toggling between English and Simplified Chinese.
Annotation and Keyboard Controls
The recording interface provides cursor highlighting, a drawing brush, and an ink clearing tool.
Zooming is handled purely via keyboard controls with a 3x punch-in centered on your mouse cursor. Zoom applies only to the exported video; the desktop display remains unchanged. Regular mouse clicks do not trigger zoom.
Default global shortcuts:
Cmd+Option+=: Zoom in 3x centered on the cursorCmd+Option+-orCmd+Option+0: Reset to 1x normal viewCmd+Option+P: Toggle drawing brushCmd+Option+K: Clear all drawings on screen
These global cross-app hardware shortcuts have been compiled, but have not yet been verified on actual hardware.
Local Processing and Current Limits
All media processing in TD Capture runs locally on your machine, with no cloud uploads, sharing links, telemetry, or user accounts. You save and distribute your exported MP4 files yourself.
Current limits:
- Runs only on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later.
- Audio input is microphone-only; internal system audio is not captured.
- You cannot pause during recording; clicking stop ends the session.
- No built-in cloud sharing or automated editing features.
- Screen recording permissions ran into a glitch earlier: re-adding the current app to Screen Recording permissions and restarting the app restored capture for this build, though later rebuilds may need reauthorization.
The project is an early prototype, ad-hoc signed, not notarized by Apple, and not on the Mac App Store. The source code is open on GitHub: JoyceGu/td-capture . This article describes the latest source code at commit 1dc2220 as of 2026-10-22. The downloadable v0.4.0 release predates the newest recording controls and shortcut changes, so it does not include all recent updates.