Is Ascent Open Source?
Ascent's recorder is fully open source — a fork of OBS Studio. Here's what that means, why we did it, and what parts of Ascent are (and aren't) open source.
The Short Answer
The Ascent recorder is open source. The rest of the app is not.
Our recording engine is a public fork of OBS Studio called ascent-obs. Anyone can read the source code, audit it, or build it themselves. The desktop app — the UI, game detection, analytics, cloud features — is closed source.
Why Open Source the Recorder?
The recorder is the part of Ascent that has the most access to your system. It captures your screen, encodes video, and writes files to disk. That's a lot of trust to ask for, especially from a relatively new app.
By making the recorder open source, we're saying: don't take our word for it — read the code. You can verify exactly what the recorder does and doesn't do. There's no telemetry hidden in the capture pipeline, no data being sent anywhere you can't see.
This is a deliberate choice. We think the recording layer should be transparent.
Built on OBS
We didn't write a recorder from scratch. Ascent's recording engine is a fork of OBS Studio, the most widely-used open source broadcasting and recording software in the world.
That means Ascent inherits OBS's battle-tested encoding pipeline:
- Hardware encoding via NVENC (NVIDIA), AMF (AMD), and QuickSync (Intel)
- Years of optimization across thousands of GPU and driver combinations
- Proven reliability — OBS is used by millions of streamers and content creators daily
We fork OBS rather than bundling it as a plugin because we need tighter control over the recording lifecycle — when to start, stop, and how to handle game-specific events — while still getting the benefit of OBS's encoder and output infrastructure.
How It Works: IPC Architecture
Ascent doesn't embed OBS into the main app. Instead, the recorder runs as a separate process that communicates with the Ascent desktop app through IPC (inter-process communication).
In practice this means:
- The recorder is isolated — if the recording process crashes, the main app stays running (and vice versa)
- Lower resource contention — the recorder can be pinned to specific CPU cores or given its own priority without competing with the app's UI
- Clean separation — the open source boundary is clear. The recorder process is ascent-obs. Everything else is the Ascent app.
This architecture is part of why Ascent achieves under 1% FPS impact. The recorder does one thing — capture and encode — and does it in its own sandboxed process.
What's Not Open Source (and Why)
The Ascent desktop app itself is closed source. This includes:
- Game detection and automatic recording triggers
- The replay viewer and timeline UI
- Game analysis and performance metrics
- Cloud uploads and sharing
- Clip creation and editing
- Account system and settings sync
These are the features that make Ascent a product, not just a recorder. They represent thousands of hours of design and engineering work, and keeping them closed source lets us build a sustainable business while still offering Ascent for free.
This is a common model. Plenty of products use open source components internally while keeping their application layer proprietary — and that's fine. The important thing is that the part with the most system access (the recorder) is the part you can inspect.
How This Compares to Other Recorders
Most game recorders are entirely closed source:
- Medal — Closed source, Electron-based, no way to audit what the recorder does
- Overwolf/Outplayed — Closed source, Electron-based, runs an ad-supported platform in the background
- ShadowPlay — Closed source, proprietary NVIDIA software
- OBS Studio — Fully open source, but it's a general-purpose tool, not a gaming-focused recorder
Ascent sits in a unique spot: a purpose-built game recorder with a fully open source recording engine. You get the convenience and polish of a dedicated app with the transparency of open source where it matters most.
Check It Out
The recorder source code is on GitHub:
It's a C/C++ project built on top of OBS Studio. If you're a developer, you're welcome to look around, open issues, or even contribute.
The Bottom Line
We believe the software that records your screen should be auditable. That's why Ascent's recorder is open source. The app features that make Ascent useful — game detection, analysis, clipping, sharing — are closed source, and we think that's a reasonable balance between transparency and building something sustainable.
Download Ascent — free, low-impact, and recorder you can actually verify.