Show HN: Boom – A way simpler OBS alternative for macOS

[krsna]

I got sick of people complaining about Zoom fatigue. I assumed these tools would eventually fix the UX of remote meetings, but that never happened.

After leaving Shopify, a few of us created Boom to inject energy back into video calls.

Boom is a virtual camera that adds overlays to the camera feed, allowing users to display their name, title, logo, GIFs, and even their local weather. Users can touch up their appearance using camera filters like saturation and brightness. They can also use global keyboard shortcuts to mute or start a screen share automatically in Zoom and Meet.

Privacy was a big concern for us too. All of the video processing is done locally and we don’t have access to any of the meeting information, like who attended or what was discussed.

Let us know what you think (and feel free to roast us).

Krishna

[gumboshoes]

I guess you're going for the big corporation market with the pricing, although the manifesto says small biz / bootstrap operations to me. Seems like a mismatch in messaging.

I've been using https://www.mmhmm.app for this sort of video streaming embellishment. It's pretty good though somewhat confusing, especially as they now have two products that are very similar but not identical. I believe one is replacing the other one but it's not clear. Mmhmm is simpler to use than OBS, so of course not as feature-rich. OBS allows doing things with audio and you can also run different audio to mmhmm (such as from virtual channel — I do some audio cleanup to remove fan and traffic noise) and then output a mmhmm-specic audio device so that your audio and video are synced in Zoom/Meet/whatever.

[krsna]

We're still experimenting with pricing. Our initial target is prosumers and professionals who want to level up their virtual presence. We're seeing customers who work in big tech like devs and designers but also founders, consultants and agency owners.

Curious what you find confusing about Mmhmm. The audio cleanup you’re doing is pretty neat. I’ve used Audio Hijack in the past for similar reasons.

[gumboshoes]

Two other pieces of software that operate in this space that are worth checking out: Meld Studio https://www.meldstudio.co/ and Camera Graph https://apps.apple.com/us/app/camera-graph-edit-live-video/i... Camera Graph is more feature complete but costs $99 as of this writing for the full feature set. Meld Studio is free at the moment, but is still in development for macOS and Windows, and seems far less refined overall.

[mufasam]

This looks really clean.

Question: are you planning for this to be an opinionated product or do you see Boom offering similar flexibility as OBS but with simpler setup?

[krsna]

Definitely want to stay opinionated. The goal is to create a tool for professionals who don't have time to set up OBS. We spend more and more of our days in front of a camera, like streamers. But the existing video conferencing tools weren't designed for streaming at work.

[googletron]

Nice! Are the plans to move upstream into voice chat or recording software for demos?

[krsna]

We really want to address the problems with existing video conferencing tools. Meetings don’t have to be boring and energy draining. Plus there’s already a lot of good software out there for recording demos.