What is ScreenCaptureKit?

ScreenCaptureKit is the framework Apple introduced to give macOS apps a fast, flexible, and privacy-conscious way to capture screen content. It replaced older, less efficient capture methods with a modern API that streams display, window, and application content at high frame rates while keeping CPU and GPU overhead low. Developers can select exactly what to capture — an entire display, a single window, or a specific app — and can filter out content they don't want, which makes it well suited to building responsive, high-quality screen recorders and streaming tools on the Mac.

The framework is designed around performance and control. It delivers captured frames efficiently using the system's graphics pipeline, supports high resolutions and frame rates, and integrates with macOS's permission model so users explicitly grant screen-recording access. Because it operates at the system level with Apple's own optimizations, ScreenCaptureKit generally produces smoother, sharper captures with less performance impact than legacy approaches. It also lets apps exclude specific windows or apps from the recording, useful for keeping private content out of a demo.

Limelight is a native macOS screen recorder built for macOS 14 and later, so it taps into the platform's modern, high-performance capture stack to record your screen cleanly and locally. That native foundation is why Limelight can capture crisp footage and then layer on auto-zoom, cursor smoothing, and on-screen keystrokes efficiently, all while recording fully offline and uploading nothing. Building on Apple's current capture technology keeps recordings sharp and light on system resources.