I really enjoy technical how it's made blog posts, and I also enjoy elaborate desktop UI recreation web pages[1], so I made both for this project and I hope you like them. If you've got any comments or questions, I'll be pressing Cmd-R on this page.
That's some dedication...! (and definitely worth 5$)
EDIT: It seems like it doesn't work with DRM content. Or more accurately, Netflix refuses to work while it's running. Unfortunate, but expected (and not your fault).
> we knew we had to get with the times
There are already too many of us working on the web side of things! :p It's lovely to see someone crafting a fast native application instead of yet another electron app. Speaking of which, do you have any recommended literature for learning more about the things you're writing about?
I'm impressed by the CPU footprint. Shouldn't be a surprise as it's all hardware now but still great to see this which makes me comfortable let it running along.
Is there a way to change store path?
Also I changed hot key twice and seems both keys are in effect now.
RE: Two Hot Keys. Ruh-Roh. Thanks for the bug report. I'll investigate. EDIT: Will be fixed in next update. :) As a quick workaround, just quit and relaunch RetroClip and the old hotkey will be unbound, leaving just your new one active.
In that case, a symlink would work nicely: https://tinyapps.org/blog/mac/200805230700_change_imovie_sav...
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Se...
For context I downloaded OBS as much like you I was playing Fortnite BR and getting tired of having only static screenshots showing my win. OBS is ok but a performance hog. So your program looks awesome except 60 seconds is to short, sometimes the awesome play I want to share took longer than 60 seconds..
Also I play using an egpu on a second monitor so I only want to record that monitor playing. No reason to record the monitor showing discord.
Edit: I see you recommended quicktime for videos over a minute but as you've mentioned that takes up way too much diskspace to just leave running while you're playing. So I'm really hoping for some more options on the recording length.
Personally I'd like to set it to 5 mins which is what I have it set at for OBS's replay buffer. I find its much easier to trim a video than it is to merge multiple videos together.
I guess what I'm really asking is what are the real downsides to giving the user custom duration controls. So long as you provide the appropriate warnings / dialogs in a text box underneath the selections (OBS does that)? It seems like that would only increase the utility of product.
TLDR: Awesome piece of software that I think would be made even better if you gave the user more flexibility with custom durations.
It's more just an objet d'art type thing, just this sort of stylized recursive, I dunno, joke thing. It was fun to make and for some reason Nick and I find the concept hilarious, but it's also ridiculous. When I told my family about it their response, to a person, was "but why?"
You're of course welcome to view source on the page and copy anything you like (it is just a web page after all), but if I was trying to market something serious, I would definitely do it differently.
Did you have to take care of that yourself?
Really neat project, by the way: I love seeing technically elegant solutions to these kinds of singular problems! Did you run into any Mac App Store sandboxing restrictions with respect to capturing the screen?
[1] https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Dar...
Thanks for your detailed writeup! I bought the app and am gonna use it!
I actually wrote my own streamer because I wasn't happy about the resources that OBS required. Some of the code from that streamer I ended up dusting off, repurposing, and improving to write RetroClip.
Now, it's been a while, so what I'm about to say may no longer apply to current versions of OBS, and my observations may have been wrong in the first place, but when I took a tour through the OBS codebase, I felt like it was maybe supporting too broad of a feature set and supporting too many platforms to be able to attain optimal performance. Like, I'm not trying to crap on it, as it's an incredibly impressive piece of software, I'm just saying that there seemed to be a lot of data copying, cross platform concerns, and extension points, and the pipeline for getting video in from the screen and then out to the network just had a lot of work along the way, work that could be avoided if your only goal was to run on macOS and send just the screen contents to twitch as fast as possible.
So I doubt that a micro-optimization like my cursor compositing hack is going to be of benefit to OBS. I did that to avoid doing any copies at all of the raw image data in code that I control, and I would guess getting to zero data copies in OBS would be a long journey. There's probably a lot of lower hanging fruit in terms of macOS specific optimizations that can be done first.
Do you have your streamer program posted on GitHub or something? I want it.
My understanding is that like 99% of the traffic on twitch is basically the top 0.1% of channels, and all of those streamers mostly just use dedicated streaming boxes or have super beefy PCs. The market for a bare bones feature set twitch streamer for people playing games on Mac laptops has got to be pretty small. Maybe it's just you and I. :) So, that's why I kinda lost interest in it.
In some version of reality, you run with this and go on to create a fantastically useful web-based desktop system and define a new category :)
Also, this is a pretty amazing technical accomplishment, and an incredibly well-written blog post. Huge kudos.
I definitely would recommend using ScreenFlow for capturing screencast type videos where the content is at least a little bit pre-meditated. It will let you crop the screen after the fact, pan around, and do all sorts of neat edits. It's really well done and worth the money. It might fit your use case better. I'm not affiliated with it any way, just a happy user.
Its nothing thats 'ever' predetermined to be shown, its all stuff thats either on demand, or 'how did you do that' rather quickly.
being able to just hit a button, after i did the 'thing' would be super beneficial.