Riverside Screen Recorder: Resolution, Audio and Setup Explained

Riverside's screen recorder is not a separate app. It is the Share button inside the recording studio, it works on every plan including Free, and each share is saved as its own track, apart from your camera and microphone, so you can cut between them in the edit. How sharp and how loud that track ends up depends on where you record. A Chrome browser caps the screen track at 1920x1080, while the Mac app records screen tracks up to 4K but captures no system audio ^[1]. Safari only gives you a cloud copy. Our verdict is simple: use Chrome for tutorials that need sound (on a Mac, only sound playing in a browser tab can be captured), and the Mac app for crisp silent demos.

Pick the right route before you pick a plan

The route decides most of the result. On a computer, Riverside offers four ways to capture a screen, and they differ in resolution, sound and what you can download afterward. Screen sharing itself is available to hosts and guests on every plan, and to producers from Grow up, in the browser, the mobile apps and the Mac app, and it always records as a separate track. The table sums up what the help pages document for each computer route; on Free, exports stay at 720p with a watermark whatever the route.

The browser scales anything larger than 1920x1080 down and keeps the aspect ratio ^[2], so a 4K monitor arrives as a 1080p track. Microsoft Edge is a gray area. One help page lists it next to Chrome for high-quality screen tracks, while another says Edge screen shares produce only a cloud recording. Until Riverside settles that, Chrome is the safe browser. The Mac app needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 15 Sequoia or later, with M1 or newer for video, and it can record a whole screen, a single window or the camera alone.

The free web recorder is a separate tool on Riverside's site. It runs on PC and Mac but not on phones, needs no sign-up or download, allows unlimited sessions with a pause button, and stops each recording at 30 minutes ^[3]. Audio can be saved as WAV or MP3 at 44.1 kHz. Every file carries a watermark that disappears only once you sign up for an account. It suits a bug report or a quick walkthrough. For anything with a guest, a script or real editing, open the studio instead.

Prepare your computer before the first take

Most failed first sessions trace back to setup, not to Riverside. On a Mac, macOS has to grant your browser Screen Recording permission, and the browser must restart before its first share. Do that before you press record. Recording works in Chrome, Edge and Safari 18.2 or newer; Firefox, Brave, Arc, Opera, Vivaldi and mobile browsers are unsupported. Incognito and Private windows cannot record at all, and Riverside does not support recording through a remote desktop application.

Hardware matters too. Riverside asks for macOS Big Sur or Windows 7 at minimum and recommends eight or more physical cores for video recording, four for audio-only sessions. A tutorial that shares a busy screen while running your camera is exactly the kind of load those cores are for. Solo recording is available on every plan in the browser, the mobile apps and the Mac app, so you do not need a guest to open a studio. Run a short test first. Recording previews are low-resolution versions, and quality only improves on export, so judge sharpness on the downloaded track rather than in the preview window.

Record a solo tutorial without losing the track

Riverside records each screen share locally on its own track, just like the camera. That design has a few quirks worth knowing before a long session. Every time the shared window changes size, Riverside starts a new screen-share track at the new dimensions. Resize once before recording and leave it alone, or you will be stitching fragments in the editor. Switching the studio to audio-only does not lose the screen either: shared media and screen-share video are still kept as files.

Sessions end on their own after 6 hours while someone is in the studio, and Riverside recommends staying under 4. The studio logo does not appear during a screen share, and the split-screen and grid layouts are disabled while a screen is shared. Layout changes you make live show only in the all-participants cloud recording and do not carry over to the editor. That cloud recording is your safety net. Riverside creates one per participant plus a combined file after every session, capped at 720p and kept for three months before permanent deletion. If a high-quality track ends up partial, you can upload the cloud copy to the editor and keep working.

Get the sound right on each system

Sound is where screen tutorials go wrong most often. In a browser on Windows you can share audio from the whole screen or from a single tab. On a Mac browser, only a tab's audio can be shared, so play the demo video or app sound inside a Chrome tab. The Mac app shares no system audio at all. That makes it the wrong choice for a walkthrough where viewers need to hear the software.

Screen-share audio also sits outside Riverside's audio tools. It is not transcribed, so anything said through a shared tab is missing from captions and the text-based editor. Magic Audio cleans participant tracks and uploads but not screen-share tracks. The fix is to narrate. Speak your explanation into your own microphone, which records as a participant track that gets transcribed and cleaned. Riverside records each participant's audio in mono and normalizes every export to standard loudness, so leave final levels to the export rather than fighting them track by track.

Use the teleprompter for scripted demos

A scripted demo runs shorter and cleaner, and Riverside's built-in teleprompter covers it. The host teleprompter needs Pro or higher and works in the browser, the Mac app and the mobile app. Open it from the Script button, paste your text, and pick one of ten scroll speeds from 0.25x to 2x. The spacebar toggles auto-scroll. Text flips horizontally or vertically for a mirrored rig.

Two upgrades sit on higher plans. Follow voice, which scrolls as you speak, needs Grow, Webinar or Business and works in English only. Sharing the teleprompter with guests is Business only, with three permission levels from host-only to full guest control, and letting producers edit the script is also a Business setting. Guests can never edit the text. On mobile, the host gets auto-start and a Focus Mode that hides the camera feed, useful when you are reading straight into a phone.

Guests, producers and slide decks

Stopping guests from sharing needs Grow or higher, set per studio or as a default for new studios in a production. Producers, a Grow-and-up role, are never recorded themselves, yet anything they share is captured as a separate high-quality track and is visible in a live stream. That lets a producer drive the demo screen while the presenter stays on camera. On Free and Pro, which have no producers, that split falls to host and guest.

Uploading a slide deck is a different feature from sharing a screen. Presentation upload is limited to some Business plans through your account manager. It accepts PPT, PPTX, Keynote or PDF files up to 700 MB, drops presenter notes, animations and embedded audio or video, and may swap fonts for licensing reasons, so exporting to PDF first keeps the design intact. Two participants can control slides at once, but presenter control only goes to people on a computer browser. On other plans, share the slides window instead.

Download, edit and pay for it

High-quality screen tracks download only from Chrome or the Mac app (Edge is disputed, as noted above); Safari shares leave you the cloud file. In the editor, Riverside builds scenes automatically around screen shares on every plan. Two AI tools refuse them, though. Eye-contact correction skips screen-share tracks, and AI Translation rejects recordings that contain screen sharing. Exports always come out at 24 FPS and 44.1 kHz audio, whatever you recorded.

The Free plan exports at 720p with a Riverside watermark and includes a one-off 2 hours of separate-track downloads. Riverside Pro costs $35 a month billed monthly or $24 a month billed annually, removes the watermark, and allows 15 hours of separate-track downloads a month ^[4]. Recording itself is unlimited; the cap only limits downloading individual tracks.

By our arithmetic, at 20 minutes per tutorial the Free allowance covers six sessions in total and 15 hours covers 45 sessions a month. Past 45, Grow ($45 a month billed monthly or $34 a month billed annually) raises the cap to 20 hours, about 60 such sessions, and Webinar ($99 a month billed monthly or $79 a month billed annually) to 25 hours, about 75. Hours reset monthly with no rollover, and deleting a recording gives nothing back. The 14-day trial needs a card and charges automatically on day 15; our guide to Riverside's free plan and trial covers it, and Riverside pricing has every plan and add-on.

The bottom line

Riverside is a solid screen recorder when the screen is part of a conversation or a scripted lesson, because the share lands on its own track next to clean, local camera and mic tracks. Choose the route deliberately. Chrome gives you 1080p with tab sound (whole-screen sound on Windows only), the Mac app gives you 4K in silence, and Safari gives you only a cloud copy. Narrate into your microphone, lock the window size before recording, and size your plan by separate-track hours rather than by recording time. For a quick watermarked clip, the free web recorder is enough.