Show HN: Presentations for your webcam, not a projector

I love this! Some thoughts:

• I hope you're wildly successful with a subscription model, but the yearly cost for the full product is quite high for a "nice to have" even if I wasn't personally subscriptioned out.

• I typically present with PowerPoint, so the scenario where I'm speaking to slide notes is central. Although your introductory video is very good, it's unclear how this works with Presenter View.

• You emboldened "Eye Contact", so are you doing the "magic eye contact" thing that FaceTime does? Does CCP integrate with things like Stream Deck to help minimize the need to use the GUI?

Thank you. > the yearly cost for the full product is quite high for a "nice to have" As I will probably say a few more times as I work through these comments, I know the price is on the high side, but I've spoken to lots of people who need to do this sort of thing on a daily or weekly basis. Many of my users are paying >$300/year for Ecamm Live so I've priced my offering to sit alongside something like that.

> the scenario where I'm speaking to slide notes is central. Although your introductory video is very good, it's unclear how this works with Presenter View. * CueCam is built around the idea of cue cards. You write your notes on cards and then advance through them when presenting. You see your notes in a window on your teleprompter or using my companion app "Shoot's" built-in teleprompter

> You emboldened "Eye Contact", so are you doing the "magic eye contact" thing that FaceTime does? Not at all, it's all about your teleprompter - putting the text you're reading and the person you're talking to directly in front of your camera lens (or using Shoot, as close as possible to your camera lens!)

> Does CCP integrate with things like Stream Deck to help minimize the need to use the GUI? Absolutely. I have a fully-featured Stream Deck plugin. I have a Stream Deck Mini set up with a "next" button, an "aside" button and a couple more for screen sharing and quickly exiting a share. But it does a lot more, including allowing you select drawing tools on the iPad when you're drawing, with the correct drawing tool and colour being visible on the Stream Deck button (THAT was a lot of work to get right...)

I don't like presenting my screen or slides via the camera feed.

In certain apps, like MS Teams or Zoom, the bitrate for camera feeds is much lower _and_ you are just one of the several feeds on the screen. A screenshare takes over the layout so everyone is looking at the same thing.

It would be better if this gave a virtual screen rather than a virtual camera.

Perhaps you’ll like Screegle then because it overlays your webcam on what you share as ONE stream and you can share one or several windows without revealing your entire desktop https://www.appblit.com/screegle

I know it a balance between image quality and framerate, and presentation will benefit from a sharp image (nobody like to read blurred text) but presenting a screen that contains some moving elements or even a video will often be a poor experience. I wish there was a way to select between image quality and framerate when presenting sometimes, but in the meantime I use the OBS virtual camera to "present" something as my camera feed so that I broadcast a video at a decent framerate.

> A screenshare takes over the layout This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid :-)

When a screen share takes over, a conversation turns into a broadcast, which isn't always what you want.

There will always be scenarios where the improved resolution of a screen sharing codec will be necessary (and nothing is stopping you!), but I find a lot of the time there's a big white screen with a bit of branding and one bullet point on screen, and I can't see the face of the person who is talking.

I was on a group call recently where the speaker presented in this way for half an hour as a tiny thumbnail and I found it quite painful, thinking "I've been listening to this person for ages but I wouldn't recognise them in real life".

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later I had an awkward conversation where this exact person kinda recognised me but I didn't recognise her, so I felt pretty vindicated .

If we avoid the overhead of screen shares, the conversation flows a lot better, and everybody can be seen without the host having to turn anything off. And don't forget, if somebody's on a phone screen then they can't see all the detail anyway. This is why I prefer zooming in on important content than sharing my whole screen (I zoom in on my desktop using a pinch gesture in Video Pencil on my iPad and it feels magical).

I've been a paid presenter for a bunch of years, and switching to online presentations in 2020 was a huge chore. You're absolutely right about OBS being hard to work with.

This solves pretty much every problem I encountered. I would buy this in a second.

But I have to ask, why a subscription? Why can't I download this software like I do with all my other presentation software? What value does a subscription buy me?

The typical answer is it funds ongoing development, support, and maintenance. The alternative is new versions requiring repurchase of a new license to fund ongoing development. As a developer I would much prefer reoccurring revenue as an incentive to keep developing vs having to build large shrink wrapped releases and managing LTS etc.

Whether $120/year is reasonable or not is debatable though. Seems steep for the casual user but for people that professionally do presentations, these sorts of things can be extremely pricey even on purchased licenses.

There are lots of pieces of software where that makes sense, but presentation software is not one of them. Specifically, adoption of new features in presentation software is rare and slow because you don't want to be fiddling with unfamiliar things while trying to give a presentation.

I would be extra upset if a feature changed or the interface changed between practicing and giving a presentation for example.

I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

A subscription to auto-updating software is about the worst thing I can think of presentation software in particular.

These are excellent arguments.

This is probably underused in user interface: the new version can include new features but give the user the choice of when to add the new feature as a new control on their screen or when to replace an old behavior with a new behavior. That would be a useful feature in itself.

By contrast usually, the publisher acts like they know better - all the way to auto-updating (with a new user interface, sure, why not) at the exact wrong moment. For example, you launch Zoom to join a meeting that started 3 minutes ago and what do you get: minutes of auto-update which you can't even override.

“Hold tight! We’re optimizing your experience!”

I don’t remember which online meeting software told me that once in the “oh shit I’m 5 minutes late” situation you’re describing but… man did that not sit well.

> I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

Note that I'm not using the App Store for distribution, I'm using Sparkle, which means that it never updates without you allowing it to.

Also , if it's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, it would be trivial for me to make older versions available for download! (I keep them all, and this has come in very useful on some recent support calls).

becausr they want to make money from you forever not just once.

I've been thinking about this and while it's true that I have been trying to find a viable subscription model for my business over the last couple of years, that's not really important for you.

But it does benefit you in a very real way.

I work alone. I'm very good at spinning up features in a few hours. With a subscription model I can release these changes continuously, so you get new features and improvements on a weekly or monthly basis.

If I had to come up with a release schedule I'd have to make a lot of decisions about cordoning off different features, coming up with names, marketing materials, deciding what goes where. This is a huge mental and technical overhead. I'd be juggling git branches across multiple pieces of software, the website, and beyond. I'd be incentivised to put more and more things behind the next paywall and I'd be getting less and less real work done.

I don't have the marketing clout of Apple or Microsoft. They can take a different approach. I've tried a few and now I'm trying this!

One more thing, I do plan on adding some more cloud-based features as time goes on. I'm already managing a Chat GPT integration, and in future I'm picturing an online content library and search to let teams quickly access decks and slides for demos. But that's future stuff, so not relevant to your question just now.

Short answer: it lets me, as a solo developer, give you more cool stuff.

Was interested until I checked the pricing and saw it sold as a subscription. Just let me buy it and I'll decide if I want to buy version 2 next year.

This. I also can't equate the yearly value of a subscription with the usage I'd get out of it (and I do _a lot_ of video calls, always have).

I was thinking about your comment when I responded to [this one above](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346050)

This reasoning obscures the huge overhead of creating a distinct "version 2" next year. I can do a much better job on the software if I don't have to spend 70% of my time marketing the next version or sectioning off this or that feature for commercial reasons.

But I take your point, I don't love subscription software either, but most of my current users are pretty comfortable with these so it's good for now while I'm working alone. And my hosting / API access fees are not _zero_ so there is a vague justification there too.

So, I've been teaching online for 15 or so years, and the killer idea that few people seem to latch onto is to use a Virtual Machine (Linux, for various reasons.)

Just use that as the window you share. Code, slides, websites (without fear of accidentally revealing sensitive info like grades, etc) , whatever.

Maybe someone knows how to solve a common sharing issue, I didn't see it mentioned here:

I have a single ultra wide screen and would like to share a virtual area that has a normal size (16:9) with people via Google Meets, Slack, etc. Otherwise I have to share a window, stop, share another one etc.

Really bad, especially during some on call emergency session.

So far I couldn't make it work, only Zoom had this feature at some point but nobody uses Zoom where I have worked.

I use Region To Share on Windows, and just drag windows on and off that virtual area as needed (works great with PowerToys FancyZones):

- https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N4066W2R5Q4?hl=en-us&gl=U...

- https://github.com/tom-englert/RegionToShare

I haven't needed to do the same on a Mac yet, but if anyone knows of an app that does the same (i.e., define a "transparent" window that screen cap can then share in a call), do let me know (it's bound to be trickier on macOS due to window contexts, the compositor and privacy, but there might be an app out there for that)

Ah that's cleaner than my idea. Which was:

Install OBS, add a 'Scene', add a 'Window Capture' to the scene, then right click it (in sources) and transform / scale / crop the scene dimensions. Then optionally in the 'controls' panel you can start a virtual webcam, then go to Chrome/Brave settings, go to Site & Shield settings, set the default Camera to your virtual one.

Not sure if OBS would solve your Mac issue.

It wouldn’t really, since I don’t want to replace my camera feed—I just want sharing to share a region of the screen, like you do.

CueCam Presenter solves this quite elegantly: You can prepare a script with a card for each window you want to share. Then you can just select the card during the presentation and it will share just that window.

I also have a single large screen. So I put the CueCam window on the right, top to bottom. And the windows I want to share in the bottom left quadrant. There I can make them smaller, with the correct aspect ratio, so that participants with smaller screens can see all the detail they need.

That leaves the top left quadrant for my meeting window where I can see the meeting participants.

I'm also experimenting with the two companion apps: Shoot to use my iPhone camera and control zoom from CCP; and Video Pencil to draw on my video.

OBS can do this: It can capture a display (eg, the whole ultra-wide monitor), crop that capture to just the desired area, and [optionally] scale that cropped area to be sent at whatever resolution you wish as a virtual camera input to whatever conferencing system (Zoom, Slack, whatever).

Works fine. It's kind of a pain to configure, but it only needs done once and saved as a scene (which can then later be recalled with a keyboard macro or whatever, if one wishes).

(To receive bonus nachos, set the desktop background to include a 16:9 rectangle of the captured area for your own visual reference, and automate it so that this background is displayed when OBS is running. For fancy nachos, have more than one such area with one scene for each.)

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use a HDMI display emulator [0]. Set the resolution to 1920x1080, move the content or presentation you want to share to the 'ghost' monitor and then share the entire second screen in your meeting app [1].

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=display+emulator

[1] https://youtu.be/RA-XXvFHgEs

I honestly don't know if I want to be delighted or horrified by the need of a physical hack to trick your OS that there is a virtual monitor to share

Solution I mentioned above:

Can you put the stuff you need to share in a Virtual Machine? This, for me, has already solved pretty much everything this software offers.

My ultrawide display allows two display inputs, and has the option to put them borderless next to each other. I have a script that enables the second DisplayPort input using DCC. Now I can share half the screen of my ultrawide as “full screen”.

Hello Michael, fellow former-Canonicaler!

This looks super interesting, and might be a useful alternative to the OBS setup I currently have for work calls.

One thing I would really like is for there to be a clean preview feed rendered in a separate window, so I can screen share that window into Meet/Zoom/whatever. I've tried before to share content through the webcam feed to those systems, but generally the video quality sucks and the audio quality is even worse (since they all try to filter out anything that isn't voice).

Hello! Been a long time since I was at Canonical!

CueCam has a "Teleprompter Window" that you could adapt to this purpose. You can "Include Camera Feed in Teleprompter Window" and then whatever you're sharing will come through. Although it does have window chrome so maybe not ideal. Another option is to fire up a QuickTime window and use "New Movie Recording" and use that as your sharing source window.

You definitely want "Original Sound for Musicians" switched on in Zoom if you're doing any audio sharing with CueCam.

This looks cool and pretty powerful, especially being able to use multiple devices together. But I'm having a hard time understanding how it all works together at presentation time. It would be nice to have a "behind the scenes" video that shows the presenter's point of view to understand how executing a presentation scripts really works.

I was so happy to see this until I saw the subscription model. Hard no.

How much would you pay if it was just a one time purchase - let's say license with 1 year updates ?

Don't know about the person you replied to but I would fork up $40 - $50.

$40-$50

Great explainer video at the top of your page. Very helpful for understanding what the app does, and how easy it is to control.

Cool program but when visiting your site, people need to 'land' on a sexy screenshot, clear illustration, or animation that shows the functionality explicitly before literally anything else. An image that screams "this is an important presentation" with a person in the bubble confidently explaining it, then maybe something that shows how easy it is to use the iPad to mark things up. This is a communication product, so people expect it to communicate its purpose deftly. If people have to read to see how your product is better than their current solution, or scrub around an explainer video, most wont. Pretty much nobody seeks out solutions for problems they consider solved, and nobody spends more than a couple of seconds looking at a solution they don't think they need. To effectively communicate the purpose of your product to the larges number of potential customers, you need to immediately and explicitly show them how your product works to solve their problem better.

I love this. For structured presentations, this is really awesome.

It would be great if you also had more of a non-linear mode for content that is less structured and more suited to live events where anything can happen at any time.

For video meetings, podcasts/talk shows, etc. there is often content repeated between calls/presentations (theme song/intro, memes, sound effects etc) and also planned content from a topic list, but that content may be mentioned by anyone at anytime so it should be easy to trigger without too much scrolling.

Maybe it would look more like a sound effect board/stream deck/TV Mixer where there is a matrix of buttons to playback videos, add titles, show images, play sound effects, etc.

In the future, it would be awesome to have support for chroma key (green screen), data driven motion graphics (score board, live weather, live stock data, etc).

Basically, if you could dramatically simplify OBS, and it looks like you've already made some big steps in that direction, that would be highly valuable.

> It would be great if you also had more of a non-linear mode for content that is less structured and more suited to live events where anything can happen at any time.

I've been thinking on how to do this "non-linear mode for content" but haven't been able to figure out the actual infrastructure for it.

The problem I see is accessing the content in real-time; how does one pull up content in real-time without materially affecting the flow of conversation? Of course, this assumes you know the location of the relevant piece of content. And don't even THINK about combining different pieces of content together in real-time!

> It would be great if you also had more of a non-linear mode for content that is less structured I have a "Dashboard" that sits in your Status Bar for quick access to sharing and camera switching which might be enough.

> Maybe it would look more like a sound effect board/stream deck/TV Mixer where there is a matrix of buttons to playback videos, add titles, show images, play sound effects, etc. I think you're talking about a Stream Deck! CueCam gives you the other part of the Stream Deck puzzle when you do have structure, but lots of its features can be accessed with the Stream Deck plugin.

It's already possible to deep link to specific cards so you could set that up if you didn't feel like scrolling. But I'm usually fine to scroll (it's a pretty low friction interaction!) and it's less fiddling-about up front.

I have chroma key support already.

Other things may appear over time. If I find myself wanting to do some data-driven motion graphics you can bet that feature will appear within a week

Seems very slick, though I don't give pre-built presentations via webcam. Still, I would love to be able to draw on my screen when screen sharing e.g. via Google Meet. E.g. highlight a function in the IDE or a requirement in a task or do a quick diagram. These are things that have somewhat lower friction when doing the same meeting in person.

I think there's a "market mismatch" here. If you're a professional presenter, you're already used to OBS, which is complex but free, open-source, works on all platforms (as opposed to Mac-only).

Sure the "draw anywhere" feature is nice, but there are ways to achieve the same thing in OBS using a tablet (various free or paid plugins do this).

If you're not a professional presenter, sure this is easier to use than OBS, but in that case a relatively expensive subscription-only model doesn't make sense for an occasional user.

As someone who speaks to a lot of Ecamm Live users, I beg to differ. They're paying >$300/year for a tool that is basically a less-convoluted version of OBS (and Mac only).

The drawing feature is possible using other apps but it's always a bit of a compromise and awkward to set up.

I help people to do this every day and I know lots of them would prefer something easier!

> OBS, which is complex but free

A lot of professionals pay big money for tools that make their workflow simple.

Is there a free version or is it just a trial? The download button says "Use Now For Free" but doesn't tell me what that means, and I don't see a free tier on the pricing page.

Is it free for a limited trial period? How long? Are certain features free while others require payment?

This is sort of a pet peeve of mine, many tools offer a "free trial" but don't tell you what the limitations without installing it.

The only difference between the paid version and the free download is that you can only create three cards per document.

I have made the comparison table link a bit more prominent on the pricing page so hopefully it's less ambiguous now.

Ah, that table is helpful, and I definitely didn't notice a link to it before. Still, without a card for the "free tier" directly on the pricing page, you get the impression there are only paid options. I wouldn't think to click that to see details about a free tier, since (to me at least) the label implicitly is saying "Compare Features (of the pricing tiers shown on this page)".

Also, on the comparison chart, you could just say something like "Cards per slide: 3 / Infinite / Infinite / Infinite" and do away with the hover text.

Always room to iterate. I changed it from one with an obvious free tier last week to solve a different problem!

I use prezi video. But it’s very clunky. So really I use Canva for creating the slides and then Prezi video.

This seems much much better.

If it’s as good or better I’ll drop Prezi and switch completely. Pricing seems good, I don’t share the same opinion of many commenters here. Perhaps because I’m on zoom all day both in 1:1 and 1:many including workshops where I’m the speaker then I might be the right ICP

Could you do a comparison with Prezi Video ?

I didn’t see a price listed, and going to buy now requires auth. Any chance you could share pricing?

I could see this without login in https://cuecam-presenter.com/pricing

Figured it out. There’s a pricing menu at the top. If you scroll down, you only get the buy now button which requires auth. Thanks for pointing it out.

Yeah, that buy now is pretty jarring. It was the first thing I saw, not the Pricing link.

You hit "Buy Now" and it's a Sign In With Apple prompt and you'r thinking "I don't see any pricing, am I going to get to see before the purchase?"

I just updated the pricing last week and missed this button. I've fixed it now, sorry about that!

Looking at the pricing you are probably aiming for a niche target group. Best of luck.

Yep. I've learned the hard way that it's a bad idea to try targeting a mass market audience as a solo founder.

I've spent a small fortune on a camera, teleprompter, mounting, and time (seeing up OBS and streamdeck) to get something similar working for me during COVID.

(I spend a good deal of my time giving online training.)

My main issue with any virtual camera-based screensharing is that Zoom (and others) seem to degrade camera first, screensharing second, audio last. If I share a static image, it'll eventually get through. Internet lagging, laptop lagging, some random updater running, whatever.

But if I share everything via a single "camera" channel, it's all or nothing. The only "in between" is "image is blurry, face is barely legible, text is illegible".

Yeah, pretty much my experience too. I used mmhmm app for some time with great hope but the Zoom experience was subpar.

Hi! I'm the VP, Eng at mmhmm and I would love to hear more about your experience with us. :)

I like your app quite a lot. No issues with your app. I think Zoom degrades the resolution. In any case, the last time I tried it that way was last summer. If there are any major developments since then, I would love to know.

Something that gives me confidence here is that in macOS Sonoma Apple have gone all-in on sharing screen content on a webcam feed. I feel this will motivate Zoom and Teams to take this into account when compressing video. But don't forget, if high fidelity is super important, you can always switch to a normal screen share. I just find that a lot of the time, this isn't the case, and it hurts the communication overall. But yeah, I do encourage nice big, short, bold bullets in an attempt to minimise this risk.

That is really impressive. The explainer video alone made me start thinking about several different ways I want to try to use this.

I wonder. Let's assume there is video conference going thru most common: Google Meet, MS Teams or Zoom. Wouldn't webcam view degrade the resolution or quality with codecs?

Can CueCam eventually just work in full-screen and screensharing?

Seems useful, but there’s no way I’m paying a subscription for software that isn’t a service. Supporting this sort of rentseeking only means more of it in the future. I’d crack it before I’d do that.

I refer you my earlier comment about how this model unlocks value that would be much more difficult without a subscription model. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346050

But I would also dispute this as "rentseeking". Am I taking something from the commons and putting a paywall around it, or am I working hard as a producer of value, and trying to find a way to be rewarded for my labour? To me it feels like the latter. I'm not sitting back on the spoils of capital, I'm working for a living.

Well, to a point. I wouldn't have been able to attempt this without a certain amount of privilege - for instance not being rent-burdened for the last few years due to my partner owning her own home - but I'm not exploiting workers or anything here.

I wish I didn't have to spend so much time thinking about how to make money from my work. But that's Capitalism for you. But if it makes any difference, I described how I wanted to run my company (if it ever starts making enough money to support a team) by paying everyone the same here: https://goodtohear.co.uk/changes/modal/social_enterprise (direct link to a modal which usually sits on the product page).

I definitely remember streaming my screen via a virtual camera during my school days via either OBS or other off the shelf OSS software. The pricing seems excessive for something a bit of effort can fix

Would this also make sense for video recordings, educational content on YouTube? I wanted to give making educational YouTube content a try, but the whole setup and video editing were just daunting.

Grok. OP's software sounds good but I'm not paying to find out if I like doing the process in the first place.

I think I've made this clearer on the website now but you know you can download the whole thing without even creating an account on the website. The only limitation is the number of cards you can create, but it's more than enough to figure out if it's a workflow you like.

Yes. This is how I do all my educational content and there is a Record feature for just this purpose. I prefer to record another take than to spend hours editing!

I would love to see a FOSS version based on OBS. I am not a streamer and I don't need half of OBS' feature. Like OBS but ELI5 mode

Hmmm. That's an interesting idea, especially since OBS has a built-in "transparent" browser that I use to do lower thirds. Getting it to render sequences/chunks of Markdown doesn't seem too far-fetched at all.

OBS already has a virtual webcam mode, fyi

Yep, and you can prepare a list of scenes that more or less replicates the "script" feature here (though you can't save the "list of scenes" separately).

I have a YouTube video from a couple of years ago where I show how to do this sort of thing in OBS. So yeah, it's possible!

Spend some time setting up OBS and then control it via an Elgato Stream Deck. Really nice way to do pre-scripted things via easy buttons.

sounds like a game-changer for virtual presentations. I'm impressed by how you've integrated various features like camera options, drawing capabilities, and smart scripts into one cohesive suite. It's fascinating to hear about your journey from Shoot Pro Webcam to squares.tv and now CueCam Presenter.

How does the video on your home page bypass Firefox's "don't autoplay videos" setting?

Firefox allows videos to auto-play if they don't have audio enabled. (The rationale for this is that you can achieve the same effect via an animated GIF or JavaScript or a canvas, and videos are more efficient.)

This looks super. Like the late lamented CamTwist but more focused on presentations.

This is tangential, but I believe your cookie banner is not GDPR compliant (and if it’s not compliant, why bother?).

It only has the option of accepting cookies, and does not specify the kind of cookies.

Thanks for pointing this out. I did it in a hurry and thought I'd made it only load third party js if you clicked Accept.

But I think it's correct now?

That said, I'm still too scared to look at the damn hotjar data so I don't even know why I'm using it .

Mac only, Damn

Nobody wants to see our faces

lol