Screencast MCP

Screencast MCP

An MCP server that lets an agent record the screen, _watch_ the footage, and make minimal ffmpeg edits — over stdio, on Windows.

Capture the desktop, a monitor, a window, or a region; sample a recording into frames the agent can actually look at; trim, crop, redact, annotate, zoom toward clicks, and export for GitHub or social. No cloud service, no telemetry: ffmpeg and ffprobe behind 58 typed tools.

For developers who want their coding agent to see and prove UI changes on Windows: bug repros, UI verification, and demo clips the agent records, checks, and edits itself. Capture is Windows-only; the watch and edit tools work on any OS with ffmpeg. Free for non-commercial use (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); why not OBS, Playwright, or a screenshot MCP?

Made with the tool: start_recording with events: true , one click, then zoom { highlightClicks: true } and export_gif . How it was made · more workflows

Quick start · Tools · Configuration · More docs · Privacy

Quick start

The fastest path: npx -y @tmhs/screencast-mcp setup checks FFmpeg 8, OCR, and speech, offers winget install Gyan.FFmpeg when FFmpeg is missing, and adds the server to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code (backing up each config). --dry-run shows the changes first; --test records a 3-second GIF to prove it works. Or set it up by hand:

You need Windows 10 or 11, Node.js 22+, and FFmpeg 8 or newer on PATH (winget install Gyan.FFmpeg, the full build). Older builds run most tools, but transcribe (the whisper filter) and backend: "wgc" (gfxcapture) need FFmpeg 8, and essentials or distro builds can lack them (Ubuntu LTS apt install ffmpeg gives 6.x). Capture is Windows-only; the watch, edit, and produce tools work anywhere ffmpeg runs. After connecting, ask the agent to run doctor: it reports the ffmpeg version, the filters and devices it has, OCR, and anything missing.

Add it to your client:

{ "mcpServers": { "screencast": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@tmhs/screencast-mcp"] } } }

Then ask your agent:

Record my VS Code window for five seconds while I reproduce the bug, then show me the frames where something changed.

More in the workflows: a bug-repro GIF for a PR, a README demo, a UI verification loop, a social clip, a cheap review of a long recording, zoom toward clicks, and the whole edit in one call.

Why not just...

The core is the watch loop: the agent records, samples the footage into frames it can see, and checks what actually happened on screen. Capture only ever happens on an explicit tool call, and output lands under SCREENCAST_HOME, never in your checkout.

Tools

58 tools in 6 toolsets, generated from the server's own schemas by npm run docs (do not edit between the markers). Each name links to its reference page with every parameter, an example call, and what it returns; mcp-tools.json is the same list as JSON, and llms-full.txt all of it in one file.

Core

Always loaded, whatever SCREENCAST_TOOLSETS selects.

Capture

Record or screenshot the desktop, a monitor, a window, or a region. Every capture is an explicit tool call: nothing records on its own.

Watch

Turn footage into something a model can read: frames, contact sheets, diffs, OCR, and a searchable text timeline.

| [find_text](https://tmhsdigital.github.io/screencast-mc