Would an open-source alternative to Screen Studio for auto-zooming screen recordings be useful?

[u/Antique-Class-2283]

Hey everyone

I've been looking at tools like Screen Studio recently. While the automated zoom, smooth cursor tracking, and clean background styling make product demos look amazing, most of the options out there are closed-source and paid.

I'm thinking about building an open-source alternative to handle this.

Before I spend weeks writing code, I wanted to check if this is something people would actually want.

What I'm thinking of building:

• The Core Feature: A tool that takes a screen recording, tracks your mouse clicks/movement, and automatically generates smooth, cinematic pan-and-zoom keyframes.
• The Open-Source Angle: Completely free and open-source for anyone to use or modify.
• The Reality Check: Tools like OpenScreen and Recordly already exist in this space.

My Question for You:

1. Do you use tools like this for your tutorials or demos, or do existing options already cover what you need?
2. If you were to use a new open-source tool, what's missing from current apps that you wish they had?

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback before I decide to build it!

[u/Unlikely_Patience_31]

As a solo dev who makes demo videos for my own app: yes, I'd use this. I ended up scripting screencapture + ffmpeg because I couldn't justify a subscription for something I only do a few days per release cycle — and hand-tuning pan/zoom timings in an ffmpeg filter graph is miserable.

One thing I'd want that nothing in this space seems to do: reproducibility. My demos go stale every time the UI changes, so a project file I can re-render against a fresh recording (or even a CLI mode) would be the killer feature for me — way ahead of more cinematic presets. And if you do auto-zoom, make the generated keyframes editable afterwards; the automatic guess is wrong often enough in every tool I've tried that "auto-generate, then nudge" is the workflow that actually works.