The Screen Recorder's Limits: Two Stops, Two Warnings, and a "GB" That Is Really GiB

The Screen Recorder's Limits: Two Stops, Two Warnings, and a "GB" That Is Really GiB

I work on OnePassApps, the team behind app.onepassapps.com. The Screen Recorder is one of the live apps on the site, and this post is about the four thresholds that decide when a recording gets a warning, when it gets stopped, and which of them the panel says out loud. Everything below was measured on 9 November 2026, from the chunk the live page loads - captured from the page's own network trace in a browser on a desktop display - and read over plain HTTPS with no session and no cookies.

What the panel says

The Options block on the app page carries one line that covers the whole subject:

Stops at 2.00 GB or 2:00:00. Warns above 1.00 GB.

Three numbers, one line. The shipped code has four thresholds, and it checks them in a fixed order.

The ladder, in the order the code checks it

• At 2,147,483,648 bytes the recording stops, with the reason size-limit.
• At 7,200,000 milliseconds elapsed it stops, with the reason duration-limit.
• At 1,073,741,824 bytes it warns, with the reason size.
• When 600,000 milliseconds are left on the two-hour clock it warns, with the reason duration.

The fourth one is the gap worth reading. The panel text names the size warning and the two stops. The ten-minute warning is in the code and not in the copy.

The messages are exact. The size warning ends with "Stop soon and download it." The duration warning says "Less than ten minutes remain." Both stop messages end with "Download it now, then record the rest as a new clip." - one for the memory limit and one for the time limit, worded differently in the middle and identical at the end.

"GB" is really GiB

2,147,483,648 bytes is 2 GiB, not 2 GB, and 1,073,741,824 bytes is 1 GiB. The panel writes "2.00 GB" and "1.00 GB", because its own formatter divides by 1024 x 1024 x 1024 and prints two decimals. So the unit on screen is binary even though the label is not.

The same line also says "above". The code warns when the byte count is greater than or equal to 1 GiB, so the warning appears exactly at the 1.00 GB reading rather than above it.

The countdown is capped at ten seconds

The panel offers "3-second countdown", with the line "A short count before recording begins, so you can switch window." In the shipped code the countdown length is clamped into 0..10 before it is used, and the last tick flips straight into recording. If sharing ends while the countdown is still running, the app says "Sharing ended before recording began, so the countdown was cancelled." and "Countdown cancelled because sharing ended." Nothing is recorded and no clip is produced.

An empty recording is not a clip

If the recorder stops with nothing captured, the app says "Nothing was captured, so there is no clip to keep. Start a new recording and let it run for at least a second." A clip is only built when there are chunks to build it from.

The Format row is a readout

The Format line on the panel reads "MP4 (H.264 + Opus)". The code picks the first candidate format the browser reports as supported, and the same table carries a fallback entry labelled "Browser default (WebM)" that saves as a .webm file.

What the app promises about memory

The panel says "The clip is held in this tab's memory, not on disk, and is lost if you close or reload the tab before downloading it." and "Long recordings use a lot of memory; stop and download in parts." The stop message agrees with it: record the rest as a new clip.

The limits, once more, as the code has them

• Size stop: 2,147,483,648 bytes.
• Time stop: 7,200,000 ms.
• Size warning: 1,073,741,824 bytes.
• Time warning: 600,000 ms remaining.

Try it

Open the Screen Recorder at the link above, press Start recording, pick a source in the browser's own picker, and watch the size and elapsed readouts climb. The loop, and what the app will not do, is in the app's own guide.

I work on OnePassApps, and this is our own build measured on 9 November 2026. If your copy of the panel says something different, trust your screen - the app changes faster than posts do.