Hands-free product demos with Cursor IDE and Screen Beaver

The Chore of Manual Demo Videos

Shipping code takes minutes. Recording a demo video to prove it works takes an hour. Every UI tweak, refactored form, or button move forces you to clear your desktop, hit record, and drag your cursor across the screen again. You make a mistake on step four, miss a click, and restart the recording. It is tedious work that slows down development cycles.

Automation handles unit tests and staging deployments. Screen recording remained manual because recorders lacked programmatic interfaces. By combining Cursor IDE with Screen Beaver via Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can automate UI walkthroughs. The coding agent drives the application while the recording studio captures the screen, applies cursor polish, and exports the final video locally.

Prerequisites and Environment Setup

This workflow requires a Windows environment. Screen Beaver runs natively on Windows and provides local H.264 hardware encoding, keeping video processing on your machine. You can install Screen Beaver directly from the Microsoft Store, which offers a free tier alongside a Pro version.

Before configuring Cursor, open Screen Beaver on your Windows desktop. The MCP integration requires the desktop application to be running in the background. If you are comparing desktop tools, read our guide on Windows screen recorders that automate polish to understand how local encoding and cursor styling function on the desktop platform.

Connecting Cursor to @screenbeaver/mcp

Screen Beaver exposes its capture controls through an open-source npm package named @screenbeaver/mcp. This package acts as the bridge between MCP-compliant clients like Cursor and the local recording app.

You can install the package globally via npm or reference it dynamically using npx. To configure Cursor, open your project mcp.json file or global Cursor settings, then add the Screen Beaver server entry with command npx and argument @screenbeaver/mcp.

Once saved, Cursor connects to the local MCP server and registers the available video tools alongside its file editing and terminal capabilities. For a broader look at how this protocol works under the hood, read about how Model Context Protocol connects agents to video tools.

Executing a Hands-Free Demo Walkthrough

With Cursor connected to Screen Beaver, you trigger video capture directly from the Cursor chat window. Prompt the agent to run your local web application, navigate through specific feature flows, and log output.

Cursor issues commands to Screen Beaver to start capturing. You can specify whether to record a full display, an individual window, or a browser tab. If your application includes a mobile companion app, Screen Beaver can also capture Android screens over USB directly from the Windows desktop.

While Cursor clicks buttons and inputs text, Screen Beaver builds the video timeline. Automatically applied post-processing effects clean up the raw footage without requiring manual timeline editing:

• Automatic Zoom: The recorder detects active input regions and smooths camera focus onto active elements.
• Cursor Smoothing: Jittery mouse tracks convert into clean, predictable cursor arcs with click sounds.
• Captions: Spoken audio and automated steps generate clear subtitle tracks directly on the timeline.
• Framing Controls: Background blur, wallpaper gradients, and custom edge cropping isolate the app interface.

Trade-offs and Practical Limits

Automation saves time, but it introduces specific constraints you must manage during setup.

1. Desktop Application Requirement

The MCP server cannot record headlessly in an isolated background thread. Screen Beaver must remain open on your desktop. If the Windows app is closed, Cursor returns an error when calling the capture tool.

2. Agent Precision

Cursor relies on clean selectors and predictable UI states to execute walkthroughs. If your local dev server takes too long to render or an element selector changes, the agent may misclick or get stuck. When an agent misses its target, you must abort the recording and rerun the prompt.

3. Hardware-Bound Encoding

Local H.264 encoding ensures your product data stays on your machine. Nothing uploads to external cloud processors. However, encoding high-resolution 16:9 MP4 files relies on your local CPU and GPU. Running a local dev server, Cursor, and local H.264 encoding simultaneously demands modern Windows hardware.

Final Output

Once Cursor finishes driving the UI script, Screen Beaver finalizes the video track, applies auto-zooms and captions, and exports an MP4 directly to your local file system. The result is a finished product demo produced entirely from a text prompt in your IDE.