How to Share Screen Recordings: Links, Embeds, and Markdown

You finished the recording, trimmed the dead air, added a zoom on the important click. Now comes the part that quietly ruins most screen recording workflows: getting the video to another person.

Attaching a 400 MB MP4 to an email bounces. Uploading it to a cloud drive means your teammate downloads a file, waits, opens a player, and loses the thread of what you were explaining. Sharing should take one click, and the person on the other end should be watching within seconds. This guide covers the three ways Recorded gets your video in front of someone else, and when to use each.

Three Ways to Share

Recorded’s share dialog gives you the same recording in three formats:

• Link — a URL anyone can open in a browser, no app or download required
• Embed — an HTML snippet that plays the video inline on your own site or docs
• Markdown — a ready-to-paste snippet for READMEs, issue trackers, and wikis

They all point to the same uploaded recording. You’re just choosing how it gets pasted into wherever your audience already is.

Creating a Share Link

1. Finish your edit and open the recording you want to send
2. Click Share
3. Recorded prepares the files and creates a share session
4. Copy the link from the Link tab and paste it wherever you need it

One detail worth knowing: the link becomes available before the upload finishes. You can paste it into a message right away, and it will be ready to play by the time your teammate clicks it. For a quick “here’s the bug I mentioned” message, that removes the awkward wait entirely.

Sharing requires signing in to your account, since the recording is hosted for you rather than living only on your machine.

Embedding on Your Own Site

The Embed tab gives you an HTML snippet you can drop into any page that accepts custom HTML. This is the right choice when the video is part of a larger document rather than the whole message:

• Product documentation — a 40-second walkthrough directly under the written steps
• Help center articles — show the flow instead of describing six clicks in prose
• Landing pages — a silent, focused feature demo above the fold
• Internal wikis — onboarding docs where the video and the checklist live side by side

Embedded video keeps readers on the page. A link sends them somewhere else and hopes they come back.

Markdown for Developer Workflows

The Markdown tab is the one most engineering teams end up using every day. Paste it straight into:

• GitHub or GitLab issues — a repro video attached to the bug report itself
• Pull requests — show the UI change reviewers are about to approve
• README files — a demo of your project that renders right on the repo page
• Notion, Linear, or Slack — tools that render Markdown natively

A written bug report says “the dropdown closes when I scroll.” A Markdown-embedded recording shows it, along with everything the reporter forgot to mention.

When to Export a File Instead

Sharing a link isn’t always right. Export an actual file when:

• The video is going to a client who needs it for their own archive
• You’re uploading to YouTube, a course platform, or social media
• The content is sensitive enough that it shouldn’t be hosted anywhere
• The recipient needs to re-edit the footage

For those cases, export MP4 (H.264) for maximum compatibility, and consider the Optimize File Size option, which produces an additional compressed copy without a visible quality loss. That compressed version is usually the one you actually send.

Keeping Shared Videos Small and Watchable

Whether you’re linking or sending a file, a shorter, tighter video gets watched more often than a long one:

• Trim before you share. Cut the first eight seconds where you’re finding the right window. Nobody needs them.
• Remove silence. Auto silence removal tightens the pace without making you re-record.
• Match resolution to purpose. A UI bug report doesn’t need 4K. 1080p is plenty and uploads far faster.
• Add chapters for anything over five minutes. Viewers can jump to the part that concerns them instead of scrubbing blindly.
• Say the point in the first ten seconds. Assume the viewer is deciding whether to keep watching.

Check the Frame Before You Send

Once a link is out, you can’t unsee what was in it. Before you share, take five seconds to scan for:

• Notification popups that appeared mid-recording
• Browser tabs, bookmarks, and window titles revealing internal projects
• Email previews, customer names, or account numbers in a sidebar
• API keys or tokens in a terminal or environment file

Recording a specific window instead of your full screen prevents most of these before they happen. Blurring or trimming the affected section handles the rest.

Wrapping Up

The value of a screen recording is measured by how easily someone else can watch it. A link for a quick message, an embed for documentation, Markdown for a pull request — pick the one that lands the video where your audience already is, keep it trimmed, and check the frame before you hit send. The recording you can share in one click is the one that actually gets used.