Loom is software that, in one click, overlays your face in a bubble as you can narrate your screen recording, uploads it as it's recording, and when you press stop it copies a link to your clipboard you can share immediately with whoever you are showing. It's a very polished and complete experience.
OBS is for streamers. It could be set up in a similar way if you already have a twitch channel hooked into it. It won't be as polished and easy.
macOS doesn't have any upload or overlay function so it's not comparable.
OBS works great when recording locally. Sure it works for streamers, but it also outputs to standard video formats easily. You don't need a twitch channel or anything like that. You'll need to figure out where to host the video after the fact (dropbox works well enough, as it allows the viewer to stream without downloading).
Yeah I fired up OBS for the first time and it was surprisingly easy to get set up. Every time I had a 'right how do I do x?' moment I figured it out in seconds.
I used loom for the first time today, not only did it do all the things you mentioned, but it perfectly transcribed what I said, then allowed me to cut out sections of the video just by deleting words and pauses from the transcription. I thought that was pretty cool.
OBS can record videos pretty similarly, and automatically save, stream, or even be compelled to upload it somewhere.
I'm not sure if there's a simple way to get the link of the video hosted online back into your clipboard automatically. That is one feature Jing was superior to Loom on.
Are you asking in general why billions of online videos and conference calls are in this format? Or are you asking me personally? Personally I just like looking at my beautiful face.
macOS does have overlay functionality, it’s called presenter mode or something like that. Look for it in the green camera icon that shows up in the menu bar when you’re sharing your screen. It puts your face in a bubble overlayed on top of whatever you’re sharing, as you said. You’re right it doesn’t have upload though.
It may not have upload, but in any worthwhile collaboration solution you can literally just drag your screen recording into the rich text area of a comment and have it show up, maybe after converting it to a neutral codec. I did this in my last job with Jira, GitHub, and Slack, ez
Of course you can do this. Loom does the conversion and compression for you automatically so you have an instantly sharable video. Saves me time. That’s the point.
Yep, that's obviously where the value would be, but the basics have been default for quite some time unless you're using a linux or windows workstation
Apple also pushes privacy and on-device processing;
But as for the feature itself: why on earth would you want a video uploaded somewhere else before you've even had a chance to watch it back at least once?
Because you’re showing a colleague how to use a simple inventory tracker that you’ve created in Google Sheets. Or how the new multilingual Figma templates work. Or how to batch rename a folder full of files using the command line. Or whatever, really. You already know what’s in the video because you literally just recorded it. And it doesn’t need to be polished because it’s probably just going to one coworker, who will only view it once.
Oh interesting, I just looked into it and apparently it requires the app to support it. Apps like Keynote, Zoom, Slack, Facetime and Teams Classic (but not "new Teams") all support it. That's really strange imo, you'd think the OS would just add the overlay to the video signal and pass it through to the app. I wonder why it's implemented this way. The other OS-level video features like portrait mode, studio lighting, reactions and center stage don't require support from the app at all.
Where can I pay to build Loom functionality and polish into OBS, making this open source and available in perpetuity? I mean no offense to products of these sorts, but the constant reinventing of the wheel, product churn, etc is somewhat disheartening when people just want the ability to screencast in a frictionless manner.
With any of those you need to upload the video directly into Slack, or something like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Plausible for short videos, but can become a pain if recording for more than a few mins.
If you record with Cap, we'll auto handle the segmentation of the video so it can be played back efficiently (so the whole video doesn't have to be download in one go).
You can also receive comments on your Cap link, reactions, and see the analytics data.
It just makes it easier. Do your recording, then receive your shareable Cap link in just a few seconds.
> If you record with Cap, we'll auto handle the segmentation of the video so it can be played back efficiently (so the whole video doesn't have to be download in one go).
Playing an mp4 from a static file server buffers only the parts it consumes, including support for seeking. HTTP range requests work just fine.
That makes sense. How about if I already run a PeerTube instance. In that case I already have segmentation of videos so people can watch without downloading the whole file, and they could also comment on the video on my PeerTube instance if I allowed them to.
How does Cap compare to using a PeerTube instance to host screen recordings?
Yeah, but not quite. I’m not dismissing their product. Just wondering if it would be worth running a Cap server when I already have tools to make screen recordings, and I already have a PeerTube instance where I can host videos.
And actually now I am also wondering if Cap could be integrated with PeerTube so you could have which ever things Cap brings to the table aside from video hosting and have it either upload to PeerTube by API, or even having some version of Cap existing as a sort of plugin into PeerTube so that you could use it from within PeerTube
It is better than peertube because it doesn't require an extra piece of software to be learned and setup and maintained to host and deliver recorded videos.
One of the benefits of Loom is the convenience of video messaging. So it’s less about screen recording in the same way as OBS but more about replacing Slack with something more efficient. I’m not sure Cap is a replacement for Loom in that sense.
I thought so too until I used the "video messaging" of loom and found it to be a reorganized use of existing loom features instead of first class video messaging.
Video messaging can also waste both parties times if the videos are too long compared to the message.
Video messaging can be infinitely priceless where a video can explain quicker what words can't.
Other platforms have been able to get a bit further, I think there is one made by vimeo or someone used for sales that is quite good at the video messaging itself.
OBS is for streamers. It could be set up in a similar way if you already have a twitch channel hooked into it. It won't be as polished and easy.
macOS doesn't have any upload or overlay function so it's not comparable.
ffmpeg is ffmpeg